(LifeSiteNews) – 49.3 percent of President Joe Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are effectively fake accounts, according to an audit tool from software company SparkToro.
Newsweek reports that SparkToro defines fake followers as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter),” and that nearly half of Biden’s followers qualify. The report adds that Biden’s percentage of fake followers is above average, though it does not elaborate on what constitutes average.
The issue of fake Twitter accounts recently came to the foreground when tech mogul Elon Musk announced that his planned purchase of Twitter had to be paused pending investigation of the company’s claim that spam or otherwise-fake accounts comprise less than 5 percent of the platform’s users. Musk alleges that the actual number could be 20 percent or higher.
Underscoring the prevalence of the problem, the SparkToro tool also found that 70.2 percent of Musk’s 93.3 million followers are fake, as well.
As for Biden, this is not the first time he’s been the beneficiary of social media functions. In January 2021, the Epoch Times reported that YouTube appeared to delete an approximate total of 16,000 dislikes from three of the newly-inaugurated president’s videos. The company suggested at the time it merely deleted votes from spam accounts, an explanation the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact took at face value. Almost a year later, YouTube made dislikes invisible.
Most infamously, prior to Biden’s election Twitter and other social networks suppressed the New York Post’s reporting, which has since been vindicated, on a laptop his son Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, which contained scores of emails and texts detailing how the Biden family made millions of dollars through Hunter’s facilitation of meetings between his father and business interests around the world.
Twitter, Facebook, and other major online information and communications platforms have since 2016 grown more aggressive in down-ranking and suppressing political speech at odds with their left-wing politics, most infamously on the COVID-19 debate, election integrity, and transgenderism.
Recent high-profile targets of Twitter discrimination include Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, conservative satirical website The Babylon Bee, and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.