Twitter has acknowledged that more than a million spam accounts are deleted from the service every day. A media briefing was held by the firm shared on Thursday. Since its last update in May, when CEO Parag Agrawal said that more than 500,000 spam accounts are banned from Twitter every day, the number has increased by twofold. The dominant social network, however, has emphasized that less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users are phony identities. Since 2013, it has occupied that position.
Elon Musk is pressing Twitter for more information about how it counts bogus or spam accounts, which has led to Twitter’s most recent update on spam accounts. Musk, who has agreed to pay $44 billion to buy the business, thinks the approach is faulty. The CEO of Tesla claims there are far more fake/bot accounts on the social network than it is willing to disclose. He has threatened to pull out of the agreement unless Twitter can provide evidence that it isn’t inflating the numbers.
In less than a month, Twitter’s daily suspension rate of spam accounts doubled to one million, indicating that either the fraction of such accounts is more than 5% or they are expanding quickly. In either case, Musk is particularly worried about this. Last month, Twitter announced that it will grant access to its firehose API to any future owners of the business. He may then do his own analysis of the percentage of spam accounts thanks to this.
Advertisement TWITTER SAYS IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO EXTERNALLY ESTIMATE SPAM ACCOUNTS. Twitter calculates the figure based on several human checks, according to Agrawal’s post from May. It examines thousands of accounts that were randomly picked over time. We have been doing this for many years, he added, and we do it every quarter. The CEO of Twitter also disclosed that every week, the business locks millions of questionable accounts.
All of this information, though, doesn’t seem to be enough for Musk. He demands hard proof that Twitter actually has more than 220 daily active users who see adverts, as the business claims. He is prepared to spend at least $44 billion on it, after all.
Unfortunately, Twitter has made it plain that it is not possible to estimate phony accounts externally. It needs vitally confidential information that the business cannot divulge. Agrawal added, “It can seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes, we often notice many clues that its a real person,” in reference to an account with no profile picture and peculiar tweets.
Advertisement The Twitter board has already given its approval to Musk’s planned acquisition of the firm and has advised shareholders to do the same. However, the issues with spam accounts have become a significant barrier in this high-profile privatization of the major social network. We’ll update you on this story.
