As some of you may be aware, the Twitter deal is on hold until Twitter can produce an accurate estimate of spam bots and fake users on the platform.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wrote a long series of tweets discussing spam bots and attempting to justify their numbers.
While Twitter thinks that about 5% of its total user base is made up of fake accounts and spam bots, they have no way of knowing for sure.
"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," Agrawal noted. "Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account..." Blah blah blah. Boring stuff.
The whole thread was 13 tweets long. Elon tweeted back simply with a 💩
💩
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022
He then asked the question, "So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter."
Following up behind Elon was Andrea Stroppa who tweeted,
"Dear Parag, I’m surprised that you say that external researchers couldn’t estimate bots. That’s not true. As researcher that worked ~9 years on these topics (I’m the author of one of first independent report about twitter bots) I can say that’s possible. BTW: open your data 🙂"
So, this person took Twitter to task for saying this. There's some dirty stuff going on at Twitter, and Elon is bringing it to light. I'm excited to see who will be exposed next. This is the reason we need billionaires. This could not have been done by anybody else.
Photo Credit: YouTube/The Tesla Space
