More than 60% of Trump’s Twitter followers look suspiciously fake

Trump has 55 million followers on Twitter. But his tweets reach less than half of that, according to an analysis by SparkToro.

More than 60% of the US president’s Twitter following, or about 33 million accounts, have been deemed fake by the marketing software firm. It ran all of Trump’s followers through a machine-learning based tool that picks up signals that an account might be spam, propaganda, a bot, or inactive. If the account racks up seven to 10 signals or more, it was counted as fake.

What counts as a signal? Here are some that SparkToro’s tool registered for Trump’s followers:

72% have been inactive for 120+ days
3% have been inactive for between 90-120 days
3% created their account in the last 90 days
36% use Twitter’s default profile image
39% use display names that include spam words and patterns
92% either don’t use a URL in their profile or employ a URL with spam patterns
60% don’t use a recognized location
27% have set their language to something other than English
54% have gone more than a year without sending more than a handful of tweets
3% send an abnormally large number of tweets per day
96% have been placed on very few (or zero) lists
79% have an unusually small number of followers
76% follow an unusual number of accounts
74% employ spam-correlated keywords in their profile description
Here’s how SparkToro’s founder, former Moz chief executive Rand Fishkin, explains the rationale behind the analysis:

I have this sinking feeling that someone will undoubtedly point to one of these signals and say “but that doesn’t mean the account is spam/bot/propaganda/inactive!” so let me state this again: no one, two, three, or even six signals means we’ll treat an account as low quality. But, I think we’d all agree (and the machine learning model built off spam+bot accounts would concur) that it’s very rare that an account could have a combination of 7-10+ of the above signals and still be a real, active, human being regularly logging into their Twitter account. Not impossible, just exceptionally unlikely.

https://qz.com/1422395/how-many-of-donald-trumps-twitter-followers-are-fake/?utm_source=reddit.com