In the wake of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal posted a lengthy thread about spam today. Mr. Agrawal detailed Twitter’s “human review” process for suspected spam, to which Mr Musk responded, “Have you tried just contacting them?” The Tesla CEO also used the emoticon “lump of faeces.”
Mr Musk has recently advocated for the removal of bots from Twitter, as well as a slew of other improvements.
In today’s thread, Mr Agrawal stated that he would discuss spam “with the benefit of data, facts, and context.”
“First and foremost, let me say the obvious: spam degrades the Twitter experience for real people, and hence threatens our company. As a result, we are highly motivated to detect and eliminate as much spam as possible every day. Anyone who claims differently is simply incorrect “Twitter’s CEO stated.
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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022
“Spam isn’t just “binary” (human or non-human). The most sophisticated spam campaigns combine human coordination with automation. They also hack into legitimate accounts and utilise them to further their cause. As a result, they are clever and difficult to catch “Mr Agrawal explained.
“Finally, combatting spam is a highly dynamic process. The enemies, their objectives, and tactics change on a regular basis, frequently in response to our efforts! You can’t create a set of spam-detection rules now and expect them to operate tomorrow. They aren’t going to, “In the long thread, he said.
After Twitter’s chief executive maintained that the social media platform is doing everything it can to stamp out spam and bot accounts, Elon Musk responded with a faeces emoji.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal defended his company’s handling of spam and bots, denying charges that Twitter wasn’t doing enough to purge artificial accounts, only days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the issue led him to put his $44 billion acquisition of the site “on pause.”
He said on Monday that spam “harms the Twitter experience for genuine people” and that the firm is “highly encouraged to detect and delete as much spam as we possibly can, every single day.”
“Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply incorrect,” Agrawal wrote on Twitter.
Musk responded with a poop emoji, indicating that he was unimpressed. “So how can advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” he continued. This is critical to Twitter’s financial health.”
Musk suggested last week that the number of fraudulent accounts on Twitter “could be over 90% of daily active users.”
Spam and bot account operators are growing more sophisticated, according to Agrawal, making it more difficult for Twitter to identify and eradicate them.
Despite this, Agrawal maintains that spam accounts for less than 5% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users” (mDAUs).
“We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you,” Agrawal added, declining to say how the company came up with the statistics.
Musk claimed on Twitter over the weekend that Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement by revealing that the sample size for the social media platform’s automatic user checks was only 100 accounts.
The Tesla CEO wrote, “Twitter legal just called to complain that I broke their NDA by stating the bot check sample size is 100!” “This actually took place.”
On Monday, Twitter’s stock was down about 6.5 percent. On Wall Street, Twitter shares was trading for just over $38 per share, significantly below Musk’s offer of $54.20 to buy out the company’s shareholders and take it private.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives believes Musk’s use of the bot issue is a ruse to get the company to agree to sell itself at a lower price.
