ambcrypto.com
The online presence of cryptocurrency personalities has been an important aspect of pushing their cryptocurrencies towards mass adoption. Justin Sun, the Chief Executive Officer [CEO] and founder of the Tron Foundation, recently claimed that he had hit a million followers on Twitter, more than anyone else in the cryptosphere but more specifically Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
The Tron founder had tweeted:
“First one in Crypto world to break through 1 million in Twitter! #TRON #$TRX $TRX #BitTorrent #$BTT $BTT”
This sense of achievement was quashed when a researcher found out that most of Sun’s latest followers are fake or are bots. Geoff Goldberg speculated that approximately 20,000 of the CEO’s recent 50,000 followers were fake because of the way they were created as well as the nomenclature of the user names. Most of the Twitter handles included a generic name which was followed by a string of numbers, and that pattern was reflected among the majority of the new followers.
Further investigation on Sparktoro, a Twitter follower audit website, revealed that 91% of the sample accounts had no URL or non-resoling URL in their profile. Another metric stated that 96% of the follower list were accounts that “are on an unusually small number of lists”. The legitimacy of the recent followers took another hit as the statistics showed that 68% of the sample space had a “suspiciously small number of followers”.
Many fans of the cryptoverse shared their own opinions on the news with TaraXRP, an $XRP aficionado, tweeting:
“It happens a lot I think. I was trying to follow women of $XRP from a publication that featured a couple dozen prominent members. I was surprised to stumble upon heavy similarities including the majority having the same profile background picture, recent tweets, and bio language.”
The presence of fake followers and bots on Twitter has been an issue that has been raised by many luminaries in the space, which included Vitalik Buterin, Elon Musk and the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey as well.