Highlight
- Twitter said it deletes 1 million spam accounts every day in a call with authorities on Thursday
- Twitter said on the call that spam accounts each quarter represented less than 5% of its active user base
- Fake social media accounts including Twitter have been a problem for many years
Twitter News: Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts each day in a call with executives during a briefing on Thursday (July 7) aimed at shedding more light on the company’s fake and bot accounts because it “spam bots”. But fights with Elon Musk.
The CEO of Tesla, who has offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, has threatened to walk away from the deal if the company can’t show that less than 5% of its daily active users have automated spam accounts. Will go away
Musk has argued, without offering 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 spam accounts represent less than 5% of its active user base each quarter. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter said it randomly sampled “thousands” using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active. accounts” to determine whether an account is genuine.
Personal data, which is not publicly available and thus not in the “firehose” data provided to Musk, includes IP addresses, phone numbers and locations. Twitter said such private data helps avoid misidentifying genuine accounts as spam.
Fake social media accounts have been a problem for years:
Fake social media accounts have been a problem for years. Advertisers rely on the number of users provided by social media platforms to determine where they will spend the money. Spam bots are also used to amplify messages and spread misinformation. But Twitter noted in the call that not all automated accounts are malicious bots. Last year, it came out with a label for automated accounts to identify what the company calls “good bots” — such as accounts that send news, health or weather updates, for example.
Twitter and its investors are well aware of the problem of fake accounts. The company has disclosed its bot estimates to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also warning that its estimates may be too low.
Last month, Twitter offered Musk access to a “firehose” of raw data on his millions of daily tweets, according to multiple reports at the time, though neither the company nor Musk confirmed this.
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