The Head of Product X made a post on the social media platform over the weekend suggesting that 90% of followers of some large crypto accounts are fraudulent.
Responding to a user who was asking why some senior technology executives have such small followings compared to anonymous cryptocurrency accounts, Nikita Bier said that the number of genuine followers is usually much smaller than that.
“Divide crypto following by 10 to get the real number,” wrote Bier.
When asked if there are any other topics or areas that have a similar amount of fraudulent activity, Bier replied “extremist politics”.
Although this is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone, it’s rare to get insights from within a social media organisation where employees actually admit how much bot activity there is on their platforms.
For example, Telegram clearly sees huge volumes of bot activity and ad fraud, but there is little public data on how much.
Bots on both Telegram and X, at least in the financial sphere, are typically used to lend credibility to a specific project or company.
For example, crypto trading app Blum has fluctuated between having 25m to 30m subscribers over the last six months.
However, its trading bot is listed as having fewer than 200,000 users. This discrepancy is plausible but it seems very likely the company has used bot traffic to artificially inflate the size of its user base.
