Shiba Inu has the most fake followers, with 80,000 accounts. Avalanche and Polygon have 8.14% and 7.58% fake accounts, respectively. Despite the changes on Twitter since Elon Musk took over, fake followers remain a persistent problem. New data shows that up to 10% of followers of crypto influencers and businesses are simulated.
In April 2023, Musk introduced Twitter Blue. For $8 a month, you could buy verification with it. Its purpose was to increase the platform’s revenue and make bots and fake accounts financially unviable. However, dappGambls found out in an investigation that up to 10% of the followers of the most followed crypto accounts are fake.
Regarding official cryptocurrency tokens and ecosystem accounts, Shiba Inu ranks first with 10.26% or 80,000 fake accounts. Avalanche is second with 8.14% fake followers, followed by Polygon with 7.58% or 73,000 such accounts.
DappGambl suspects the relationship between Twitter accounts and their fake followers depends on the tokens’ popularity. In the course of analyzing the social sentiment behind crypto accounts, dappGambl found the following: “Dai (DAI) is the most popular coin on Twitter, while XRP (XRP) is the most hated.”
Among crypto influencers and entrepreneurs, Samson Mow has the most fake followers. 26,000 fake accounts currently follow mow. That represents ten per cent of his total Twitter following.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has 560,000 (8.62%) fake followers, while El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin each have nearly 6.5% fake followers.
Other prominent figures with significant numbers of fake followers include MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%), Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (5.58%), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (4.76%).
In terms of total followers, Musk is currently followed by over 6.7 million fake accounts. Ironically, he is now trying to solve this very problem. There are a few methods to detect counterfeit bills. Among them are checking the date of account creation, profile picture, account biography and tweets sent from the account. It also checks the followers and the people the account follows.