Elon Musk claims that 20% of Twitter accounts are bots or spam.
Elon Musk has moved the market again after noting that the purchase of Twitter will be paused until the platform’s CEO publicly demonstrates how many accounts are bots or false on the platform.
Musk, through a tweet, pointed out that 20% of Twitter accounts were false and that Parag Agrawal , head of the social network , cannot publicly demonstrate that only 5% are made up of bots.
“This deal can’t move forward until he does,” he said forcefully on the social network.
Elon Musk may be looking for a better Twitter deal as $44 billion seems too high with 20% of users being fake or spam accounts.https://t.co/rZ9Jsn60Mh pic.twitter.com/dQDVva3klZ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 17, 2022
pressure on twitter
Elon Musk is putting constant pressure on Twitter executives after pausing his purchase , with a vested interest in lowering the company’s share price.
Parag Agrawal made a thread on the social network noting that he estimates that “less than 5%” of Twitter accounts are bots. He noted that spam and bots are serious problems facing all social media platforms, and more importantly, they are an evolving and “dynamic” problem. “Adversaries, their goals and tactics are constantly evolving, often in response to our work! You can’t create a set of rules to detect spam today and expect them to still work tomorrow.”
However, Musk replied to Agrawal’s explanation with a poop emoji.
Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
“So how do advertisers know what they are getting for their money? This is critical to the financial health of Twitter,” the millionaire said in a follow-up tweet.
According to Bloomberg, Twitter says it is “committed to completing the transaction at the agreed price and terms as soon as possible,” in response to Elon Musk ‘s comments about the bots.