Twitter CEO Details Spam-Fighting Methods Amid Musk Acquisition Doubts
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal publicly explains the platform's methods for estimating and removing fake accounts after Elon Musk puts his $44 billion acquisition on hold. Musk responds with skepticism and questions about advertising transparency.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shares a detailed thread explaining how the social network fights spam and estimates the number of fake accounts on the platform. This public explanation comes just days after Elon Musk puts his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on hold while he questions the company's spam bot statistics.
Agrawal states that Twitter relies on constant system updates and random human reviews of thousands of accounts to estimate that fewer than 5% of monetizable daily active users are fake or spam. He notes that this process uses both public and private data, such as IP addresses and geolocation, to suspend bad actors without disrupting real users.
Musk responds to the technical explanation with a poop emoji and raises concerns about how advertisers know what they are paying for. Experts criticize Musk's own proposed method of sampling 100 followers as statistically deficient, leaving the future of the blockbuster acquisition uncertain as the two parties publicly clash over data transparency.