Elon Musk says Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward’ until it proves bot claims
Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier this week put the Twitter deal “temporarily on hold.” In a tweet announcing the news, Musk had revealed that the deal had been put on hold owing to pending details supporting calculating on fake accounts on the platform. Now, The Boring Company founder has said that the deal ‘cannot move forward’ until Twitter proves that less than five percent accounts on its platform are bots.
“…Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” he wrote in a tweet.
20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
His tweet comes shortly after Musk while speaking at the All-In Summit 2022 conference in Miami on Monday said, “You can’t pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed.”
When asked if the Twitter deal was viable at a different price, Musk said, “I mean, it is not out of the question. The more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow.”
The development also follows Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal sharing a long thread detailing how bots worked on Twitter after Musk claimed that Twitter users were “being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize.”
Very important to fix your Twitter feed:
1. Tap home button.
2. Tap stars on upper right of screen.
3. Select “Latest tweets”.You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize.
Easy to switch back & forth to see the difference.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
Responding to Musk’s tweet, Agrawal said, “We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).”
Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
“Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts,” the Twitter CEO wrote in another tweet adding that details pertaining to the company’s process of reviewing bots had already been shared with Musk a week ago.
The post Elon Musk says Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward’ until it proves bot claims appeared first on BGR India.