Musk says no Twitter deal without clarity on bot accounts

The tech mogul Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal are arguing about bots, which Musk has made a core issue in his acquisition of the microblogging site.

On the other hand, Agrawal outlined Twitter’s approach to spam accounts and the obstacles it faces in dealing with them in a series of tweets on May 16.

Every day, Twitter suspends almost half a million spam accounts, according to Agrawal. He reaffirmed Twitter’s long-held estimate that less than 5 per cent of its daily active users are spam accounts, which Musk mentioned on Friday when declaring that his $44 billion proposal to buy Twitter was temporarily on pause.

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

That estimate, according to Agrawal, is based on ‘many human reviews of thousands of users’ picked at random, but it’s impossible to know which accounts are counted on any given day.

While Twitter feels its estimations are realistic, the measures were not independently validated, and the actual number of bogus or spam accounts could be greater.

Believe it or not, Musk responded to Agrawal’s first 13 tweets with a ‘faeces emoji’.

Musk then asked a more thought-provoking inquiry about how can advertisers know what they’re getting for their money as this is essential Twitter’s financial health.

Tesla’s CEO has been vocal about bots and spam accounts on Twitter, describing bitcoin spam and bots as the most aggravating issue on the network.

Read more: Musk postpones Twitter acquisition after discovering number of fake accounts

Anyone who has seen the answers to Musk’s tweets knows that they are full of such con artists, many of whom try to profit from Musk’s fame.

However, other analysts believe that the world’s richest man is leveraging the bot issue to lower the price at which he would purchase the platform, whether as an unusual bargaining ploy or out of necessity.