Vast majority of Twitter users fakes and fraudsters, says report

13:33 11th March 2010

Just one in five people in Twitter are genuine, according to a new report by Barracuda Labs.

The survey analysed more than 19 million Twitter accounts and found that the social networking website is overrun by fraudsters and fakes. It found that only 21 per cent of Twitter users are genuine.

According to the lab, two-thirds of the accounts created each month between November 2008 and April 2009 were eventually suspended for malicious or suspicious activity.

Growth in the number of accounts reached its highest level at 22 per cent in April last year, Barracuda Labs said.

In other news, Yahoo and Twitter have entered into a global partnership, according to news reports.

Twitter feeds and status updates will all be available from within Yahoo's main home page. Yahoo also wants to use access to the Twitter public data stream to update the content across all Yahoo sites.

Written by Derek Oldman

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