Around 40% of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Twitter followers are bots.
That’s according to SparkToro, a service offering audience research across various social media platforms.
The revelation comes as #TrudeauMustGo has been trending on Twitter for days. According to the left-wing National Observer, “much of the activity surrounding the hashtag was actually driven by accounts tweeting at non-human rates, including about two dozen accounts created in the past 48 hours.”
It’s unclear whether The National Observer knows that almost half of Trudeau‘s following are bots boosted by “accounts tweeting at non-human rates.”
Ironically, Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts also said the campaign against Trudeau was trending because of Twitter bots.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Twitter have been in court fighting over the social media platform’s worth due to the number of fake accounts.
According to the Associated Press, “Elon Musk accused Twitter of fraud in a countersuit over his aborted $44 billion deal for the social media company, which he claimed held back necessary information and misled his team about the true size of its user base.”
It’s unlikely Musk would have been incentivized to sue Twitter over the number of bots on the platform unless he thought he could win the lawsuit.
Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, recently testified to congress regarding many issues he identified throughout the business practices of Twitter.
According to The Guardian, Zatko raised questions over Twitter’s approach to bots and suggested that the company does not have a handle on the problem.
Musk cited the prevalence of bot accounts on Twitter as a critical reason for declaring his withdrawal from the takeover. Bots disrupt and manipulate the experience of users.
Zatko said Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal lied when he tweeted that Twitter execs were “incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can.”
