Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is pumping the brakes on his acquisition of Twitter until the company can prove its user base isn't heavily polluted by spam and bots.
20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.
Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.
This deal cannot move forward until he does.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal claimed Monday the company cannot show how many accounts are fake or spam while claiming the platform does everything possible to keep the problem under control.
Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
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
Agrawal's claims prompted Musk to call for more transparency from the company.
Seems like Twitter should welcome external validation if their claims are true
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
The war over spam and how many accounts are active on the platform has been brewing since before Musk made his $45 billion offer to buy the social media company earlier this month.
For example, @taylorswift13 hasn’t posted anything in 3 months
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2022
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