A poop emoji. That is what Elon Musk tweeted after CEO Parag Agrawal wrote a thread about “spam” clearly in response to Musk’s contention that Twitter has more than the 5% of fake accounts or bots it claimed in regulatory filings.
This follows Musk’s apparent revealing of confidential information (that Twitter randomly selects 100 accounts to survey for bots) and putting his controversial $44 billion takeover “temporarily on hold” over whether the 5% fake accounts is accurate. He has since tweeted he thinks it is more like 20%.
Agrawal’s response, he tweeted, would be done “with the benefit of data, facts, and context”.
In his next tweet, he wrote:” spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.”
Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts every day, he added, “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).”
Admitting to not being “perfect at catching spam” he says every quarter Twitter has “estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts”. This refers to monetizable daily active users.
He outlines the methodology of how Twitter works out if the account is real, saying “FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes we often see multiple indicators that it’s a real person”. Personally, I find that hard to believe. I get followed by FirstnameBunchOfNumbers Twitter accounts whenever I write about ANC politicians. I kid you not. I can write whatever horrible, but true, thing Facebook or Google did and nothing. Mention Gwede Mantashe or any other ANC figure and hello FirstnameBunchOfNumbers.
Agrawal’s final argument is that “we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share)”.
How does Musk respond?
With a poop emoji.
Musk is behaving increasingly like, well, an ill-tempered billionaire brat. This is the world’s wealthiest person, who has already broken an agreement not to disparage Twitter executives, responding to a thoughtful, data-rich thread from the CEO of the company he wants to buy with a poop emoji.
It betrays a lack of decorum, frankly, and petulance that once saw Musk call a Thailand rescue cave diver “pedo guy” when he labelled Musk’s outlandish mini-submarine a publicity stunt.
This is the man who would be king of the “digital town square” as he calls Twitter. It really doesn’t bode well. Perhaps I am old-fashioned in my belief that leaders should be like Nelson Mandela or Barack Obama and most recently Volodymyr Zelensky: inspirational leaders you look up to and admire for their honour or morality, or bravery.
Musk can say he is investigating the percentage of fake accounts, but it is hard to get away from the prevailing sentiment that he is trying to negotiate a cheaper price. After all, tech stocks are about 20% down and Twitter’s valuation a month after the takeover bid emerged has taken as much of a hammering as other big names.
In a video interview Musk annunciates objections more articulately, Twitter has “been vociferously less than 5% fake/spam accounts, but, in fact it is 4-5x that number. It’s big deal. It’s like, I agree to buy your house, you say the house has less than 5% termites. That’s an acceptable number. But if it turns out it’s 90% termites. That’s not okay. It’s not the same house”. Obviously, @elonmusk replied “exactly”.
Where was this more cogent reply to Agrawal?