Twitter President Defends Spam Account Count After Musk Criticism

Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said on Monday that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform over the past four quarters were “well below 5%”, responding to criticism from Elon Musk. about the company’s management of fake accounts.

Agrawal said Twitter’s estimate, which has remained the same since 2013, cannot be reproduced externally given the need to use public and private information to determine whether an account is spam.

Musk, who on Friday said his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” pending information on spam accounts, responded to Agrawal’s defense of the company’s methodology with a feces emoji.

“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is critical to Twitter’s financial health,” Musk wrote.

Shortly after his tweets, Musk told a private conference in Miami that he suspects bots — or automated accounts — make up about 20% to 25% of Twitter users, according to tweets from attendees.

Musk called for testing random samples of Twitter users to identify bots and said he has yet to see “any” analysis that shows spam accounts representing less than 5% of the user base.

The billionaire said on Sunday that “there is some chance that it is more than 90% of daily active users”, while independent researchers estimate that 9% to 15% of the millions of Twitter profiles are bots.

Currently, Twitter does not require users to register using real identities, and automated profiling, parodies and aliases are allowed on the service.

The social network prohibits impersonation and spamming and penalizes accounts when the company determines that its objective is to “deceive or manipulate others” by engaging in scams, coordinating abuse campaigns or artificially inflating engagement.