Elon Musk has added flavor to Twitter’s buying saga, with the billionaire commenting on his considerations on the number of spam accounts on social media before claiming he could reduce his offering to $44 billion.
Twitter had claimed in the past that fake accounts or spam accounted for less than five percent of its monetizable daily active users in the first quarter, an estimate Musk questioned. First reported through Bloomberg, Tesla’s CEO said Monday at the All-In Summit in Miami. that if the challenge of bots and spam turns out to be worse than that indicated by Twitter, a deal would potentially be offered for a lower price.
“It’s based on a lot of points here. I’m still waiting for some kind of logical explanation for the number or type of fake accounts or spam on Twitter. And Twitter refuses to tell us. It’s kind of strange. “Musk said.
“Like you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’ll agree to buy your space. ‘You say space has less than 5% termites. That’s an appropriate number. But if it turns out that the right percentage is 90% termites, that’s not good,” Musk added.
Musk raised more questions about the legitimacy of Twitter’s bot estimate and wondered if the user experience reflects the social media company’s estimate of 95 percent of valid users.
Read: Elon Musk explains what he will replace from Twitter
These considerations may be well discovered, as SparkToro and Followerwonk’s joint research of 44,058 randomly chosen from active Twitter public accounts found that 19. 42%, nearly 4 times Twitter’s estimate for the fourth quarter of 2021, have support for a “conservative definition of fake accounts or spam accounts. “
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal addressed the spam user factor in a tweet thread on Monday, a thread Musk responded to with a poop emoji.
Agrawal stated that one of the most demanding situations related to solving the spam challenge includes deleting bot accounts “without inadvertently postponing other genuine people or adding unnecessary friction for other genuine people when using Twitter – none of us need to solve a captcha each. “we use Twitter. “
“The fight against spam is incredibly *dynamic*. Opponents, their goals and tactics are constantly evolving, in reaction to our work!You can’t identify a set of rules to stumble upon spam today and expect them to keep working tomorrow. it won’t,” Agrawal concluded.
The comments refer to Twitter’s firing of two top executives. Agrawal reportedly told a leaving worker that he hopes to “take the team in another direction”: the company is about to take control.
Meanwhile, Musk alerted his fans on Sunday with the news that “Twitter Legal just called to complain that I violated its NDA by revealing that the length of the bot’s control pattern is 100. It happened. “