Friday, 08 July 2022 – Tesla CEO, Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is reportedly in jeopardy due to the inability to verify Twitter’s figures on spam accounts.
Musk, who offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, has threatened to walk away from the deal if the company can’t show that less than five percent of its daily active users are automated spam accounts.
According to Mail Online, Twitter offered Musk and his team access to the platform’s ‘firehose’ of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets last month. But three people familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that Musk’s team has concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.
The sources said Musk’s team is likely to take drastic action, but would not say what that could be. If Musk pulls out of the deal, he could be in for a massive legal battle, the Post reported.
In a call with executives Thursday,July 7, Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts each day during a briefing that aimed to shed more light on the company’s fake and bot accounts as it tussles with Musk over ‘spam bots.’
Musk has argued, without presenting evidence, that Twitter has significantly underestimated the number of these ‘spam bots’ automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation – on its service.
Twitter said on the call that the spam accounts represent well below five percent of its active user base each quarter.
To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter said it reviews ‘thousands of accounts’ sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active, to determine whether an account is real.
Private data, which isn’t available publicly and thus not in the data ‘firehose’ that was given to Musk, includes IP addresses, phone numbers and location. Twitter said such private data helps avoid misidentifying real accounts as spam.
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