- A report by Geoff Golberg claims that almost half of the 50,000 New Followers of Justin Sun are bots
- This comes after Sun had boasted of surpassing the million follower mark
It is near impossible to deny the importance of social media in the crypto community. Everything from breaking news to opinions and price predictions is shared over social media. There is also the unfiltered interaction between leaders in the crypto space and everyday people.
However, a new analysis claims that Justin Sun, one of the most influential people in the crypto industry, might have faked some of his followers. The analysis also delves into some of the intricacies of social media and how it influences and can be influenced itself.
From Feuds to Fake Followers
The genesis of the matter stems from a feud that took place between TRON founder Justin Sun and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. This is not entirely unexpected as both men have made comments regarding each other in the past and seem to be in some sort of rivalry.
This comes just after TRON announced a new USDT Token and Ethereum received support from Samsung.
The need for the study came up when Sun bragged about surpassing the million follower mark, which would mean he had more followers than Buterin or any other crypto-related account.
This claim inspired Geoff Golberg, a researcher who focuses on the use of bots on Twitter, to take a look at the validity of Sun’s claims, through which he found some interesting results.
Fake or Nay?
Golberg conducted his study by looking at the 50,000 new accounts that have followed Justin Sun in recent times. According to his analysis, over 20,000 of the accounts appear to be bot accounts and this is based on a number of factors.
First, almost all of the 20,000 accounts are less than a month old. Most times, when bot accounts are created, they are done en mass and begin their designated activity almost immediately, which Goldberg claims is a likely sign that these accounts are fake.
~20K of @justinsuntron’s most recent 50K Twitter followers are accounts which were created this month
Many of them look like these pic.twitter.com/wux70mfXB6
— geoff golberg (@geoffgolberg) March 23, 2019
Another alleged sign is the fact that they account names are a combination of a single name and numbers, which is an activity that is common among account creation software. Yet another thing these accounts have in common is that they have virtually no activity on Twitter besides following Justin Sun.
All these, Golberg states, are evidence pointing to Sun having a significant number of fake followers.
