Elon Musk bragged last July that its X platform which was formerly Twitter has already reached more than 540 million users.
At that time, the tech billionaire considered it a record-high for the newly-born microblogging site. However, the latest report says that millions of active accounts on the app are inactive.
Elon Musk's X is Riddled With Fake and Inactive Accounts
Elon Musk's claims about the monthly userbase on X spark suspicions as the latest data revealed something that's not aligned with the number.
The colossal growth of daily active users on X comes as a surprise since it's still a rebranded version of the popular Twitter app. It's quite too good to be true at first look.
Interestingly, there's a detailed analysis released by a Berlin-based software developer. According to Benzinga, the new data reveals that the millions of followers are just "ghost" accounts. Some of them are already dormant.
With more than 153 million followers as of late July, Musk claimed that it just slightly exceeded a quarter record for a total of 540 monthly users.
Somehow, these numbers seem to be shady for some reason and some people question if the record is legitimate to rule out.
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Millions of X Users Are Fake or Bot Accounts
Just a quick review of what third-party researcher Travis Brown collected regarding Musk's follower data. According to him, around 40% of Musk's followers are only following less than 10 users. That's not the only suspicious information we got here.
As Mashable reports in its latest article, over 40% of Musk's followers did not tweet anything on their accounts. Additionally, only 42% of over 153 million followers appear to have no followers.
With that being said, it's easy to conclude that what Musk said last month was simply a hoax. He could be telling the truth, but he did not know that the majority of them are just bots or fake accounts.
If we're all seeing ghost followers on X, then this could entertain queries as to how many people are legit followers on the platform.
What's Fishy About Musk's Claims
At the time of Twitter's acquisition, Musk was already aware that the site was plagued with millions of bot accounts. Following this, he also said that the number of bogus Twitter accounts was underreported.
It made sense why he badly wanted to buy the social media app as part of his business expansion. He still pushed through the deal despite knowing the dark side of the platform.
At the time, the only thing that we are sure of is that there are over 830,000 active users on X.
If Musk believes that there's a significant decline in the number of monthly users on X, then there could be another side of the story that's waiting to be explored soon.
The stats that Brown gathered are not entirely saying that all accounts are fake, but there's really something fishy to think about them. After all, who would have thought that Musk is also removing the "block" feature soon?
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