The article is just clickbait. The title is obviously clickbait (based on your edit you've realized that "active account" !== "accounts that tweet"). Then they try to define active account:
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
Ok, but "consuming the activity on their timeline" is essentially unknowable outside of Twitter, since you can't see what tweets people are viewing. It turns out they're trying to infer this through some other signals like follower count, etc. But you can imagine why that might be sketchy.
Then they constrain the analysis:
> A more fair assessment of Mr. Musk’s Twitter following would only include accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days
Let's be real, if you look at a list of Elon tweet replies, they might as well all be spam. Just search @elonmusk and sort by latest. Then compare that to the sorted tweet replies under an actual tweet. IDK how many millions of dollars and man-hours went into the AI that sorted this list, but it seems to just be putting the blue checks at the top and shrugging at the rest. I doubt this three man team is doing any better at spam detection.
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
Ok, but "consuming the activity on their timeline" is essentially unknowable outside of Twitter, since you can't see what tweets people are viewing. It turns out they're trying to infer this through some other signals like follower count, etc. But you can imagine why that might be sketchy.
Then they constrain the analysis: > A more fair assessment of Mr. Musk’s Twitter following would only include accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days
Let's be real, if you look at a list of Elon tweet replies, they might as well all be spam. Just search @elonmusk and sort by latest. Then compare that to the sorted tweet replies under an actual tweet. IDK how many millions of dollars and man-hours went into the AI that sorted this list, but it seems to just be putting the blue checks at the top and shrugging at the rest. I doubt this three man team is doing any better at spam detection.