Twitter’s CEO and Elon Musk are beefing over bot counts
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is pushing back against Elon Musk’s concerns around spam and bots on the platform, saying that Musk’s suggestion to measure the problem by performing a random sampling of 100 accounts wouldn’t work. “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5 percent,” Agrawal wrote on Twitter today. His defense comes after Musk suddenly sprinkled some doubt on his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter by tweeting that the deal was “temporarily on hold” over spam concerns.
According to Musk, the hold was put in place pending details to support the service’s estimate that less than 5 percent of its measured daily active users are bots or spam accounts. Specifically who needed to be convinced,...