What happened: According to a recent joint audit by two research companies, almost 23.42 percent of Elon Musk’s 93 million Twitter followers were found to be fraudulent or spam accounts. The two organisations, SparkToro and Followerwonk, stated that their definitions of “spam” and “fake” may differ from the microblogging site’s. Details: The company claims that 50,000 accounts were recognised as non-spam using a system of 17 warning signals on an algorithm that ran 35,000 bogus Twitter accounts bought by SparkToro. If one of the billionaire’s followers was tagged for several spam signals, they were classified as low-quality or fraudulent, according to the study. It further stated that inactive users who haven’t tweeted in 90 days made up 70.23 percent of Musk’s followers, Stats: According to the study, 73% of Musk’s Twitter followers used spam-related keywords on their accounts, and 71% used places that didn’t match any region. Furthermore, 41% of the accounts have display names that follow spam account patterns. A significant number of accounts (69%) have been inactive for more than 120 days. Why it matters: The evaluation comes after Musk declared last week that he would put his $44 billion Twitter takeover on ice unless the firm can verify that less than 5% of its followers are fraudulent. In a heated dispute with Musk, Twitter CEO Prag Agarwal defended the business’s stats, claiming that the firm suspends half a million spam accounts per day.