Fake accounts on social media have become an increasing problem, undermining the credibility of influential individuals and hot cryptocurrency projects. A report from the website dappGambl reveals that crypto Twitter accounts suffer the most from fake followers.
Shiba Inu Coin tops the list with over 10% of its 790,000 Twitter followers being fake. The large number of fake Shiba Inu followers can be considered an intentional attempt performed by the project’s supporters to artificially boost its perceived influence.
dappGambl analyzed over 100 crypto coin Twitter accounts and found that many had between 5% to 10% fake followers. Other projects with high volumes of bots include Avalanche with over 74,000 fake followers out of 946,000 (8% of its followers) and Polygon with 73,000 out of 976,000 (nearly 8% of its following as well).
Similar to Shiba Inu, other so-called “meme coins” including Pepe, Bone ShibaSwap, Floki, and Dogelon Mars also have thousands of fake followers although the percentage relative to their total following is smaller.
Interestingly, Dogecoin (DOGE), which can be considered the pioneer in the meme coin space, has a small presence of bots in its following base of only 0.3% according to the data provided by dappGambl.
Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk Has its Fair Share of Fake Followers Too
Popular crypto figures on Twitter also have thousands of fake accounts following them. Samson Mow has over 26,000 out of his 260,000 followers classified as bots. Meanwhile, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has over 560,000 fake followers, amounting to 8.6% of his total while Raoul Pal’s 31,000 fake followers make up 6.2% of his total 503,000. Even Elon Musk, with 141.6 million followers, has over 6.7 million bots resulting in 4.8% of his total Twitter fan base.
Fake followers can damage the credibility of crypto influencers and projects, mislead investors, and diminish the value of real followers. dappGambl revealed 5 ways to spot fake Twitter accounts, from checking when they were created to analyzing their profile details and activity. Combating fake followers must be a priority for the crypto community to maintain trust and integrity on social media.
The proliferation of fake accounts following cryptocurrency projects and influencers on Twitter poses a serious risk, providing “false confidence” around their perceived popularity and influence.
Companies like dappGambl that can identify and expose the magnitude of this issue perform an important service and help raise awareness of the need for solutions. With more transparency around fake followers, real supporters, and experts in the crypto space should rise to the top.
Bots Can Be Used to Mislead the Public to Get Them to Invest in Crypto Projects
The presence of bots in social media networks including Twitter is easily noticeable by anyone who uses these platforms frequently. Elon Musk was aware of the problem when he acquired Twitter and even argued that the company provided fake figures about this issue and tried to back down from the deal by using that argument as justification.
The founders and investors of crypto projects can use fake accounts and bots to artificially inflate the fan base of these ventures so unaware individuals believe that they are credible and have positive prospects.
By posting comments about the cryptocurrency on the project’s own account and in posts published by rival ventures, they can raise awareness, get more investors on board, and ultimately raise the price of the digital asset they are supporting.
A research report published by web solutions provider SimilarWeb in September last year indicated that bots on Twitter could account for just 5% of the platform’s total monthly active users (MAUs) rather than the 20% or so that Musk suggested at some point.
The head of Tesla (TSLA) has tried to fight bots since he took over the reins at Twitter but developing a systematic and accurate procedure to identify and eliminate these accounts has proved to be an elusive task.