Since buying Twitter and turning it into X, Elon Musk has become the single most-followed person on Xwitter with 153.8 million followers (at the time of publication). Obviously, some of these “followers” are bots, as most everybody with a significant following on the platform has faux accounts attached to them. The real question is: How many? Is this über-rich man we call Elon Musk mostly hot air?
A new report based on data collected on Musk’s followers by computer programmer Travis Brown is enlightening, to say the least. According to Mashable and journalist Matt Binder, who reviewed the data, Brown’s collection process followed “X’s rate limit parameters.” Musk’s follower number was just above 153.2 million when the data was collected. While there is no way to know exactly how many of Musk’s followers are definitively fake, what can be determined is how many are inactive and may never have been active.
The report gets pretty granular in breaking down these followers but one of the big numbers that pops out is that about 42% (more than 65 million) of Musk’s 150+ million followers have zero followers of their own. About the same number of Musk’s followers have never tweeted anything—or if they have, they must have deleted anything and everything before the data was collected. As for Musk’s ill-advised $8 X Premium subscription? About 0.3% (well under half a million) of his followers subscribe.
That comes out to roughly $48 million a year. That’s big money. It’ll take a little less than a millennia for Musk to recoup his $44 billion acquisition!
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According to the research, more than one-quarter of Musk’s current followers created their accounts on or after Oct. 27, 2022. That’s the day Musk officially became the owner of Twitter. You might recall that day, as it was marked by a flood of racists and antisemites blasting their invective across the platform.
Obviously, this doesn’t necessarily mean all these tens of millions of accounts are just fake. However, there are some telltale signs that things aren’t exactly on the up and up:
Just around 25 percent of all of Musk’s followers, or more than 38 million, use the default profile image that X provides for newly registered accounts. More than 40 percent of Musk’s followers, or just under 50 million, have 4 or more numbers in their @ handle on X.
Furthermore, more than 43.8 million Musk followers follow less than 10 users in total via their X account. Around 13.5 million users only followed one single account, @ElonMusk, at the time the data was collected.
At the end of July, Musk bragged that his social media company had 541 million active monthly users. This was the kind of boast most people took with an enormous grain of salt since it was only a year earlier, a few months before Musk bought Twitter, that the active count was estimated at approximately 229 million monthly users. Whether or not you believe Musk’s number, it is clear that his follower list seems to account for a large percentage of these “active users.”
Of Musk’s “active users” (I count myself as one, albeit with diminishing returns), it is hard to know how many are simply watching the garbage fire that is $44 billion being flushed down a digital toilet bowl.
Musk’s possible inflation of users isn’t even his most recent boneheaded move. In the middle of August, he announced that he would disable the “block” function on Twitter, writing, “Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs.” He was fact-checked by his own “moderation team” for potentially violating Apple and Google store policies, thus jeopardizing his business once again.
Instead of acknowledging that he once again knows next to nothing about running a social media platform, Musk has decided to once again attack the people he disagrees with … by blocking them! Can’t. Make. This. Up.
The wannabe emperor can walk around naked during this digital age, because his subjects are unwilling to point out when he is wrong. It’s also impossible to point out that the emperor is wrong—because most of those subjects don’t really exist.
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Did anything happen while we were all taking a well-deserved break? Something about Donald Trump being indicted not once, but two times! Also in the news: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign collapse. So much is happening!
