Elon Musk was already a very popular user of Twitter, and when he became the sole owner of the social network, the number of followers began to increase rapidly. It has more than 153 million followers today, but not all of them are real people, as new research shows.

Musk promised to fight robots but led them instead

Researcher Travis Browne decided to examine the entire crowd and was amazed at what he found. Among the questions asked in this review were:

• Who are Musk’s followers on the platform?
• How active are they?
• How often are they published?
• Consuming too much original content on X?
• Have they subscribed to X Premium, the paid feature set formerly known as Twitter Blue?
• But the most important thing Real followers of mask or fake?

Mashable’s data analysis notes that the word “inactive” is more appropriate in this case because it more accurately describes results: Most of Musk’s followers don’t actually use the site at all.

• Of the 153,209,283 accounts that followed Musk at the time of data collection, about 42 percent (that’s over 65.3 million users) have no followers at all.
• 72 percent (about 112 million) have less than 10 followers.
• On Musk’s 62.5 million followers did not tweetand therefore they can be considered dead accounts.
• There are less than 10 tweets per 100 million pages.
• Another very interesting detail about Musk’s followers is when exactly they created their accounts. Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022. More than 25 percent (38.9 million) of Elon’s current audience was created on or after that day.

Are Musk’s followers fake?

All of the aforementioned data can show fake accounts, inactive pages, and even “hidden” – users who only consume content but not reveal their own activity. Most likely, it’s a combination of the three. However, there are a few more statistics that point to the first two types of users.

Over the years, social network users have developed a specific list of signs that can indicate an account is fake or bot. For example, if the account uses a default avatar or an automatically generated username, usually consists of a series of random numbers and letters. Often people, especially those considering using the platform, set their own custom @ identifiers they use on their other social networks, or even invent a new one that follows some word or phrase.

• So about 25 percent (over 38 million) of all Musk’s followers use the default profile picture X provides for newly registered accounts, a schematic representation of a human figure.
• More than 40 percent of Musk’s followers, or just under 50 million, have 4 or more numbers in their @ ​​handle.
• In addition, less than 10 users follow Musk’s more than 43.8 million followers.
• During data collection approximately 13.5 million users followed only one @ElonMusk account.

Finally, the analysis shows how many of Musk’s followers buy premium for $8 per month. The head of the company regularly promotes the product from his account, and the fact of subscription has long been associated with Musk’s personal support among platform users. The data shows that only about 453,000 (only 0.3 percent) of Musk’s followers subscribe to X Premium.

What are the results?

To gather information, Travis Browne used the site’s regular API without any foreign tricks. This placed certain restrictions on him. These are, first of all, delays in data collection speed. Additionally, the final community of more than 200,000 accounts following Musk was also inaccessible.

The researcher also found that more than 39,000 of the collected accounts have been deleted since then, and less than 6,000 have been suspended (banned).

Musk recently said that the social network now has more than 540 million “monthly users.” If true, this means that more than 25 percent of accounts on the platform follow Musk.

Considering how large a fraction of Musk’s followers are not on his platform, or perhaps never existed because they are bots, it seems like a large part of X’s overall user base may not be all that active either.