The Majority Of Traffic To Twitter On Super Bowl Sunday Was Fake

Elon Musk has been very vocal about bots on Twitter and wanting to get rid of them. But the fact is that bots are everywhere on Twitter and anyone who still uses the platform will tell you that. As proof of that, there’s this report from Mashable that says the following:

This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history.

Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.

However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.

According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”

So it seems that this battle against bots that Elon is waging is a losing one. Assuming that he’s truly waging a war against bots and not just lying about waging a war against bots. This really hurts the credibility of the platform when it comes to advertising on the platform. And I suspect that this report may send some more advertisers heading to the exits. It will be interesting to see how Elon reacts to this report as this really looks bad.


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