The Shiba Inu community had the most fake followers, accounting for 10.26%, or 80,000 accounts, with Avalanche and Polygon not far behind, having 8.14% and 7.58% fake accounts, respectively.
Twitter’s issue with fake followers continues to be prevalent, even after changes implemented by the platform’s management following Elon Musk’s acquisition. New findings by dappGambl reveal that approximately 10% of followers of accounts linked to crypto influencers and firms are not genuine.
In an attempt to boost the platform’s revenue and discourage the use of bots and false accounts, Musk introduced Twitter Blue in April 2023, an $8 monthly subscription for verification. However, dappGambl’s research several months later uncovered that nearly 10% of followers of the most popular crypto accounts are fabricated.
Examining the official accounts of cryptocurrency tokens and ecosystems, Shiba Inu SHIB $0.000008 leads with the largest number of false followers at 10.26% or 80,000 accounts. It’s followed closely by Avalanche AVAX $13.30 with 8.14% fake followers, and Polygon MATIC $0.7161 with 7.58% or 73,000 fake accounts.
DappGambl posits a correlation between Twitter accounts and their fake followers based on token popularity. A social sentiment analysis of crypto accounts led dappGambl to conclude that:
“Dai (DAI) enjoys the highest popularity on Twitter, while XRP (XRP) is the least favored.”
The Twitter crypto community typically views Dai DAI $1.00 as the “future of money,” while it generally associates XRP XRP $0.49 with scams, according to dappGambl.
In terms of crypto influencers and entrepreneurs, Samson Mow holds the record for the highest percentage of fake followers among his total following, with 26,000 fake accounts making up 10% of his total Twitter followers.
Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey has 560,000 (8.62%) fake followers, while El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin each have nearly 6.5% fake followers.
Other prominent individuals with a significant number of fake followers include MicroStrategy’s co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%), Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao (5.58%) and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk (4.76%), among others.
Musk, who is actively working to mitigate the issue, has over 6.7 million fake followers based on the total count. Recognizing fake accounts can involve inspecting the account’s creation date, analyzing the profile picture, account bio and tweets sent out, and checking the account’s followers and who it follows.
A notable Twitter bot, “Explain This Bob,” was recently deactivated after Musk identified it as a scam. As reported by Cointelegraph, the bot was designed by Prabhu Biswal from India, and used OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to understand and respond to tweets by users who tagged the account.