Social media giant X (formerly Twitter) has reportedly had 75% of fake traffic to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl, according to data from cybersecurity firm CHEQ that tracks bots and 'fake' users.
In a press release X claimed it has "completely smashing key metrics from last year, with impressions, user posts and video views rising 31%, 41% and 75% respectively YoY1".
But according to CHEQ, majority of the traffic was bots and fake users.
Guy Tytunovich, CHEQ founder and CEO, said he's never seen anything even remotely close to 50%, not to mention 76% of faked traffic.
"I'm amazed…I've never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close," Tytunovich told Mashable.
The data was based on 144,000 visits to X's advertising sites during Super Bowl weekend.
The data was collected from across CHEQ's 15,000 total clients - it's a small portion of the relevant data, and it's not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend, CHEQ said.
CHEQ tracks how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client's page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.
CHEQ also provided 'fake traffic' data pertaining to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake.
Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic.
And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake.
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