Elon Musk has (again) added spice to the Twitter takeover saga. The billionaire again raised concerns about the number of fake accounts on the platform, before saying he might scale back his $44 billion offer. Twitter previously claimed that fake or spam accounts accounted for less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the first quarter. An estimate questioned by the founder of SpaceX and Tesla.
The entrepreneur thus declared on Monday that if the problem of bots and other spam swarming on the platform proved to be more serious than indicated by Twitter, he would revise his offer downwards. “I’m still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number or nature of fake accounts or spam on Twitter. And Twitter refuses to say so. It seems strange,” slipped the boss of Tesla. “It’s like when you buy a house: if you say that house has less than 5% termites, that’s an acceptable number. But if the correct percentage turns out to be 90% termites, then that is no longer acceptable. »
Elon Musk’s concerns may be well founded. A study by analysts SparkToro and Followerwonk, based on 44,058 randomly selected active public Twitter accounts, found that 19.42% – nearly four times Twitter’s estimate for Q4 2021 – would meet a “conservative account definition.” fake or spam”. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal once again addressed the issue of fake account estimates on the platform in a series of tweets published on Monday. Elon Musk reacted to it in a style all his own: that is to say by publishing a poop emoji.
New twists to come?
In particular, Parag Agrawal claimed that one of the main challenges associated with solving the spam problem is to remove bot accounts “without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter”.
“The fight against spam is complex. The tactics employed by fake account authors are constantly evolving, often in response to our work! You can’t design a set of rules for detecting spam today, and expect them to still work tomorrow. This will not be the case, ”argued the leader.
This new pass of arms follows the departure of two of the main leaders of Twitter: Kayvon Beykpour, general manager, and Bruce Falck, head of revenue and products.
For his part, Elon Musk alerted his followers on Sunday that “Twitter’s legal department just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing that the robot verification sample size is 100! It really happened”. The billionaire then explained how his team would assess the estimate, compiling a “random sample of 100 followers”, before inviting others “to repeat the same process and see what they discover”.
Source: ZDNet.com