Elon Musk has halted his planned purchase of Twitter temporarily until he can gain clarity on how many accounts on Twitter are spam accounts.
After Twitter filed earlier this month that in the first quarter of 2022, less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) were spam accounts or bots.
However, Musk has estimated that a minimum of 20% of Twitter accounts are fake, and tweeted yesterday morning in response: “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
This comes just hours after the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, posted a long thread relating to spam on the site.
He stated that it is impossible for anyone outside of Twitter to accurately calculate the number of spam accounts as it would require private and public information that Twitter is not legally allowed to share.
However, Elon Musk has stated that his team will be conducting their own analysis to try to determine the number of spam accounts, but his approach is said to be extremely lacking.
On Friday, he tweeted: “To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter,
“I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.
“Pick any account with a lot of followers, ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th. I’m open to better ideas.”
The co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, logged into his own Twitter account to make the point that Musk’s approach uses a sample size that is too small, and as well as not being properly random it leaves for too much space for error.
