As you know, the Twitter deal is on hold temporarily until Twitter can actually provide the total number of spam bots and fake users on the platform.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal gave this long thread of tweets explaining the spam bots and trying to justify the number that they have.

While Twitter estimates that approximately 5% of the total number of users are actually fake accounts and spam bots, they really don’t know that for a fact.

“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 actually called out Twitter for saying this. There is some seriously shady business going on at Twitter and Elon is exposing it to the light. I can’t wait to see who gets exposed next. This is why we need billionaires. Nobody else could have done this.

Photo Credit: YouTube/The Tesla Space