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Removing Spam Accounts Would Cost Elon Musk Millions Of His Own Twitter Followers

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Elon Musk's plans to eliminate spam Twitter accounts would hit his own follower numbers hard.

Using Twitter Audit, Scottish digital skills academy CodeClan has analyzed the top 20 most-followed accounts on the social media platform, from Barack Obama to Britney Spears. And, it finds, Musk would lose 13.5 million followers, around 14 per cent of his total count, if fake accounts were wiped from the site.

Musk this week abandoned his legal battle to avoid taking over Twitter, agreeing to pay $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. He had previously tried to pull out of the deal on the grounds that Twitter had misrepresented the number of fake accounts in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Such automated accounts purport to belong to real people, but are devoted to spreading misinformation and financial scams. "Often cybercriminals use Twitter bots on a large scale to spread harmful and malicious content, and social media platforms need to step in by introducing further security measures to help address the issue," says .

Musk has said he wants to bring numbers down to less than five per cent, claiming back in May that the true figure was at least four times as high. Spam bots were the 'single most annoying problem' on Twitter, he said.

Musk, though, would be far from the biggest loser if all these fake accounts were eliminated. Justin Bieber would lose the greatest number of followers - 19.2 million from a total of 114.2 million. However, Britney Spears would lose the highest percentage, with an astonishing 48 per cent of her 55.8 million followers appearing to be fake.

Barack Obama would lose 14.6 per cent of his 131.9 million followers, and Katy Perry 21.4 per cent of her 108.9 million follower count.

"We think it is incredibly important that bot and spam accounts get removed from the platform of Twitter. The vast number of spam accounts is harming user experience, endangering legitimate users and profiles," says Linda Scott, chief marketing officer at CodeClan.

"Whilst we do understand that the problem is more complex than simply removing a user, the issue needs to be addressed and rules put in place."

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