On Thursday, Twitter stated that it removes 1 million spam accounts each day in a call with executives with the aim to discard more light on the company’s fake accounts as it struggles with Elon Musk over fake “spam”. Elon Musk, who is the Tesla CEO who had offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion has intimidated by the deal that he would walk away if the company fails to show that 5% of its daily active users are automated spam accounts.
Musk even argued that without any proper evidence Twitter has misjudged the number of these fake spam accounts – automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation on its service.
On further clarification, Twitter said that the spam accounts represent well below 5% of its active user base each quarter. For calculating the number of accounts that are malicious spam it reviews thousands of accounts randomly using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, and geolocation, about how the account behaves in an active state this will help determine whether the account is real or not. Private data was given to Musk and wasn’t available publicly and thus it was not in the data ”firehose”. All such private data helps to misidentify the real accounts as spam.
Even last month Twitter offered Musk access to its “firehose” of raw data on hundred daily tweets but neither the company nor Musk had confirmed this.
