Elon Musk says that his Twitter deal won’t move forward until the company can prove that less than five percent of accounts on the platform are “spam accounts.” As the Tesla frontman has been dancing around the social media company and taking over for almost a month now, here comes another snag. One of the cornerstones of his bid for Twitter was the idea of “getting rid of spam bots” but it would be pretty hard to do at any number of accounts. Many social media experts expressed a ton of skepticism about a majority of the billionaire’s goals while he was anticipating the acquisition. Also curious is how they planned to go about this at Twitter. There was a lot of talk from Musk about authenticating every user. But, social media experts and historians also had myriad reasons why that’s a terrible idea and costly to deploy. So, the billionaire and the prospective company are in a holding pattern until further notice.
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“20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher,” Musk tweeted. “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.”
Current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal addressed some recent move and the spam conversation on the platform this week. “We announced changes to our leadership team and operations yesterday. Changes impacting people are always hard. And some have been asking why a “lame-duck” CEO would make these changes if we’re getting acquired anyway. The short answer is very simple,” he argued.
“While I expect the deal to close, we need to be prepared for all scenarios and always do what’s right for Twitter. I’m accountable for leading and operating Twitter, and our job is to build a stronger Twitter every day,” Agrawal continued. “No one at Twitter is working just to keep the lights on. We take pride in our work. Regardless of the company’s future ownership, we’re here improving Twitter as a product and business for customers, partners, shareholders, and all of you.”
“Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter,” he observed. “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.”
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