On Thursday, Twitter announced that less than 5% of its 226 million monetizable daily active users were fake or spam accounts. Elon Musk claims his bid to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold.” To see Twitter’s financials, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a link to May 2nd Reuters piece on Twitter’s filing, adding he was curious about the company’s computations.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Twitter transaction on hold pending details supporting computation that spam/fake accounts do actually comprise less than 5% of users.”
Tesla is up 5% and Twitter is down 19% as of this writing after the news broke.
An excerpt from Twitter’s filing is provided below. “We estimate” the amount of fake or spam accounts, but the real number “may be more than we have calculated,” the company said in a statement.
We conducted an internal analysis of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average number of fraudulent or spam accounts in the first quarter of 2022 was less than 5% of our mDAU. A period’s worth of fake or spam accounts is the average number of false or spam accounts found in the samples throughout the course of each month’s analysis. It is possible that our estimate of the number of false or spam accounts does not precisely represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.
Twitter has had issues in the past with math. In an earnings report a few weeks ago, it stated that it had overestimated its daily users for the past three years. According to the corporation, a technical issue had resulted in it miscounting its user numbers by as much as 1.9 million each quarter since it counted several accounts that were actually linked to a single user.
As part of his pitch to improve Twitter, Musk has emphasised reducing the number of “spam and scam bots” and “bot armies,” as well as promoting free expression and making the ranking algorithms open source.
The latest setback for Elon Musk’s plan to take over Facebook is that the deal has been put on hold. Prior to April, the corporation had declared a so-called “poison pill” mechanism to thwart a takeover attempt, but it eventually agreed to the deal.