A recent analysis conducted by Geoff Golberg, an online researcher, has revealed that a large percentage of TRON Foundation founder Justin Sun’s Twitter followers might be fake and/or bot accounts. According to Golberg’s investigation, many of Sun’s mostly new followers on Twitter are accounts that appear to be only a few days old.

As first reported by TrustNodes, there are around 50,000 new Twitter accounts that recently started following Sun, a former Ripple Labs employee. Significantly, Golberg’s research analysis found that approximately 20,000 of Sun’s new followers had accounts which were created in the past 24 hours. These “zero day” accounts mostly had no or very few followers and many of them had never even tweeted any messages.

Twitter Accounts Following Sun Created This Month

Golberg, whose research efforts are mainly focused on detecting manipulative or exploitative activities by Twitter bots, confirmed via the microblogging platform that approximately 20,000 of Justin Sun’s “most recent 50,000 Twitter followers are accounts which were created this month.”

Examining the accounts a bit more carefully revealed many of them have a string of eight digits after their display name. This, Golberg argued, may suggest such accounts were quickly created by some type of automated software. Notably, the researcher mapped the suspicious accounts by the date they were created and found that the majority of them are most likely fake.

On several occasions, the Tron founder has bragged about surpassing Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in terms of followers on Twitter. However, a detailed investigation reportedly conducted by an auditing website has found that about 90% of accounts following Sun had various “URL issues” and that nearly 70% of such accounts had “suspiciously small number of followers.”

Research Methodology May Not Reveal 100% Accurate Results

Additionally, roughly half, or 50%, of the Twitter accounts created were only an average of 3 months old, the auditor noted. These same suspicious accounts also appear to have very low levels of engagement on the social media network as the majority, 60%, are following very few other Twitter accounts.

According to TrustNodes, the research methodology used involved obtaining a sample of 2,000 of Sun’s 1.01 million followers. As acknowledged by the researchers, there is potentially some level or percentage error in their estimates – given the relatively small sample size.