Over the last week, Musk mentioned that Twitter’s estimation that 5% of all its accounts are fake could be correct, which has invited his over 90 million followers to conduct their own rudimentary experiments to find out. Of course, anecdotal testing like these ultimately proves nothing, on top of being massively flawed.
As with many aspects of the platform, Musk is seemingly learning about these processes in real-time, despite all of his various questions being raised and assessed in various forms. To start, Agrawal explained that detection of bot accounts isn’t easy and is likely not doable for regular users:
“The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts and then use them to advance their campaign. […] The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially, are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface. Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter.”
On this note, randomly counting suspected fake accounts won’t be accurate, for obvious reasons. To add, the reference to performing a CAPTCHA verification process each time you use the app is a direct reference to another suggestion by Musk. Simply put, identifying spam and fake profiles take from many elements. Not just on ‘gut feeling’. Twitter has the back-end insight to support its investigations. This is interesting because according to Musk, Twitter only samples 100 random accounts for this figure.
Musk then further claimed that Twitter contacted him over violating the terms of his agreement on this element. It’s either that Musk is completely making this up or Agrawal is exaggerating Twitter’s process. It’s all but smooth sailing for Musk and his takeover. To sum things up, Agarawal says that its fake account figure is less than 5%, based on its most recent report, to which Musk replies with a simple poop emoji. Very classy.
The Wrap
At present, it seems that the deal won’t go down smoothly – this continuous back and forth would likely trigger some level of concern over Musk’s capacity to transform Twitter and make it more profitable. Also fascinating is how we can see the internal machinations of a multi-billion dollar deal come down to misinterpretations and technical interpretations.
Momentarily bypassing the tedious side-topics and elements involved with this ongoing development, ultimately, it may well boil down to Musk just wanting to reduce the price of his offer to end up with a better deal. Maybe this is just how Musk operates? Either way, it’s not the most inspiring origin story for Twitter’s next era.
Subscribe to our‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
