While Elon Musk had reached a $44 billion agreement to acquire Twitter, he recently announced that he had suspended this agreement. This sudden decision of Musk was due to the number of spam / bots / fake accounts that Twitter officially announced. Twitter announced in its latest report that the share of these accounts among all accounts is only 5%.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, shared in his statement that the purchase was suspended until the calculation details confirming this data were shared. While the discussion about fake accounts on Twitter continued, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal made a long statement on the subject. Agrawal drew the reaction of Musk with his statements.
Spam accounts harm Twitter
Talking about spam posts on Twitter, Agrawal said that spam harms people’s experience, thus disrupting their business. For this reason, he emphasized that they continue to work every day to minimize spam as much as possible. After explaining that spam can be a combination of humans and automation, and therefore complex and difficult to detect, Agrawal shared that they close more than 500,000 spam accounts every day.
How are accounts detected, how is the number of fake accounts calculated?
Agrawal briefly explained how these accounts were detected on Twitter as follows: Human verification measures such as captcha and phone verification, and continuous updating of systems and rules. The rate of spam accounts, on the other hand, is calculated by hand, that is, by a human review, on thousands of randomly selected Twitter accounts.
Agrawal noted that Twitter rules and both public and confidential data were used in this review process. He stated that the last account in the examinations made with this methodology was 5%. Parag then made a controversial statement.
No one can do the calculation outside of Twitter
Parag shared that the account in question cannot be made outside of Twitter due to the use of both public and private data. To this explanation of Parag, a single-worded answer came from Elon Musk:
Musk then asked a question to Parag:
- So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is essential to Twitter’s financial health.
Harsh statement from Elon Musk
“Even though it’s 4 times what Twitter claims, 20% fake/spam account “The rate could be much higher. My offer was conditional on Twitter’s SEC documents being accurate. Yesterday, the Twitter CEO openly refused to show evidence that it was less than 5%. This deal cannot move forward (until we show proof).”
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