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| - Fact Check: No, Elon Musk never tweeted that ex-Pak PM Imran Khan has most 'fake' Twitter followers
A screenshot of a tweet allegedly made by Twitter's CEO Musk pertaining to former Pakistan PM Imran Khan has been shared widely online.
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India Today Fact Check
Musk made no such comments. In fact, we found that the Twitter CEO had never mentioned either Khan or Pakistan in any of his tweets.
Did Elon Musk declare that former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had the maximum number of fake followers on Twitter? Well, some people on the social media site certainly seem to think so. A screenshot of a tweet allegedly made by Twitter’s CEO Musk has been shared widely online.
It reads, “I am confirming that Pakistan's veteran cricketer Imran Khan has the largest number of fake followers on Twitter.” The screenshot also contained a grab from a Twitter analytics tool that showed that more than 60 per cent of Khan’s followers were fake.
People shared the screenshot with captions like, “More than 60 per cent of #PTI Chief #ImranKhan's followers were fake and they have been removed from his account by #Twitter after #ElonMusk's crackdown on fake accounts on bots”.
The archived version of this tweet can be seen here.
AFWA found that Elon Musk did not tweet any such thing.
AFWA PROBE
The date of the tweet in the viral screenshot appeared to be December 13. So, we did a thorough scan of Musk’s Twitter timeline but didn’t find any tweet about Khan or an analysis of his followers on the site.
We also checked the archived version of Musk’s Twitter account in the event he had deleted the tweet. We found nothing there as well. Using Twitter advanced search, we found that Musk has never mentioned either “Imran Khan” or “Pakistan” in any of his tweets.
Additionally, had Musk made such a comment, it would certainly have been covered by mainstream media outlets. We found no news reports about this.
After examining different Twitter follower analysis tools, we found that the photo in the viral tweet was from Sparktoro, an audience research tool. We used this tool to analyse Khan’s Twitter followers and it showed that 62.1 per cent of his followers on Twitter were supposedly “fake” — bots, spam accounts, inactive users, propaganda, or other non-engaged/non-real users. This number was close to that in the viral screenshot. However, there is more than meets the eye.
Another tool Follower Audit showed that Khan has just 2.7 per cent fake followers. What causes this disparity?
It is important to note that each Twitter analysis tool has its own definition of fake accounts. They use a plethora of factors to decide whether an account is fake or not. For example, accounts which have been inactive for a certain period of time, or accounts with a suspiciously small number of followers can be part of the calculation. However, this does not necessarily mean that all such Twitter accounts are “fake”.
Additionally, Sparktoro audits a sample of 2,000 random followers for any given account and runs diagnostics on them. This sample size is often too small to provide any meaningful insight into the actual number of fake followers one may have.
It is noteworthy that a few months back, several news outlets had reported that around 70 per cent of Musk’s followers on Twitter were “fake”, based on audits done using Sparktoro.
Thus, to sum up, Musk did not tweet about Khan or his followers on Twitter. The viral screenshot is a doctored one.
(With inputs from Ashish Kumar)
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