Lilia Nguyen’s perception of everything around her changed when she went to the border to help Ukrainian refugees shortly after the war began. The change has been felt by other young Poles.
Nearly 20% of all accounts on the platform are fake, the same research says
Almost half of President Joe Biden’s 22.3 million Twitter followers are fake. The findings were reported by Newsweek on Tuesday, citing analysis by SparkToro. The same measure was used by Elon Musk to pause his acquisition of the social media giant.
SparkToro, which operates a tool for identifying “fake” Twitter accounts from genuine followers, looked at the official @POTUS account and found that 49.3% were inauthentic. The screening process takes in several factors, from activity data to profile pictures, to make a judgment on whether there is a real person behind each account. The share of bots following Biden is higher than for most accounts, the company said.
Last week, billionaire Elon Musk paused his $44-billion acquisition of the platform, claiming that the company was wrong when it stated that less than 5% of Twitter accounts were “spam/fake”. He claimed the actual percentage to be closer to 20 and said the buyout price he offered to shareholders was based on the company estimate and an adjustment was in order.
Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets about the issue, with the executive touting Twitter’s efficiency in removing inauthentic accounts from the platform. Twitter suspends 500,000 fake accounts a day “usually before any of you even see them” and locks millions each week on suspicion of sending spam, Agrawal said.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).
SparkToro said Musk’s assessment is accurate, based on their findings from a sample of some 44,000 active public Twitter accounts. They classified almost a fifth as fake.
The metric may vary significantly depending on whether dormant users are excluded from the sample. SparkToro also turned its attention to Musk’s followers and concluded that 23.42% of active accounts and 70.23% of all accounts subscribed to his posts were bots. Newsweek didn’t clarify whether the sample of Biden’s followers analyzed by the firm was filtered for activity.
On Friday, @ElonMusk said his deal to acquire Twitter was on hold pending an analysis of “spam/fake” accounts.
We’ve now completed an analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts who’ve tweeted in the last 90 days. 19.42% are likely spam or fake.
A 2018 SparkToro analysis of then-President Donald Trump’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump, found that of the 54 million followers he had at the time, 61% looked fake. Trump has since been de-platformed by Twitter.
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Ankara’s threat to block Finland and Sweden’s bids reportedly has nothing to do with Russia
Turkey’s list of demands for NATO and its prospective members Finland and Sweden includes the removal of sanctions imposed on Ankara over its purchase of S-400 missile defense systems from Russia, as well as re-inclusion in the F-35 advanced aircraft program, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing “three senior Turkish officials.”
On May 15, Finland and Sweden officially announced their intention to join NATO in the wake of the ongoing Russian military offensive on Ukraine. To make it possible, all members of the alliance would have to unanimously support their bids. Turkey, however, said it would not say “yes” to Helsinki and Stockholm because they do not have “a clear unequivocal stance” against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP/C), groups that Ankara considers terrorist organizations.
Sweden and Finland have a record of granting political asylum to people from Turkey, particularly ethnic Kurds, fleeing internal conflicts – something that Ankara finds unacceptable. According to Bloomberg, Turkish leadership demands that Sweden and Finland “publicly denounce not only the PKK, but also its affiliates before being allowed to join the bloc.”
As Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu confirmed on Monday, his country also wants Sweden and Finland to cancel trade restrictions they imposed on Turkey.
However, as Bloomberg’s sources said on the condition of anonymity, Turkey’s wish list is long.
“Turkey wants to be re-included in the F-35 advanced aircraft program, from which it was barred after it bought S-400 missile-defense systems from Russia. It also has an outstanding request to the US to purchase dozens of F-16 warplanes and upgrade kits for its existing fleet,” Bloomberg writes.
Ankara also wants the US to lift sanctions that Washington imposed on it for purchasing the S-400 missiles.
The news agency’s sources, however, refuted the suggestions that Turkey’s objections against Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership were in any way related to Ankara’s ties with Moscow. Russia has warned Helsinki and Stockholm against joining the bloc and promised an appropriate response should they create threats.
On Monday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that “Turkey is a valued ally and any security concerns need to be addressed.”
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