Well, this could get ugly. Elon Musk is now trolling Twitter’s own CEO over the company’s approach to fighting and calculating spam.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal today published a long thread describing how it counts fake and spam accounts. In response to one of the tweets, Musk posted a smiling poop emoji.
The move comes as Musk is bickering with Twitter over how the company calculates the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform. Twitter estimates less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users are fake. But last week, Musk decided to hit pause on his takeover bid amid concerns Twitter has been miscounting the problem.
Musk’s solution is to randomly sample 100 users on the platform, which he claims is the same methodology Twitter uses. But on Monday, Agrawal tried to push back on the undercounting concerns in a long tweet thread explaining how Twitter calculates fake and spam accounts.
“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’s CEO wrote.
According to Agrawal, Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts each day using the company’s detection systems. “We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam — if they can’t pass human verification challenges,” he added.
To calculate the spam/fake account problem, Twitter then conducts human-led reviews on thousands of accounts that are sampled at random. However, the human-led reviews only occur on monetizable daily active users, which Twitter defines "as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day."
“Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account,” Agrawal wrote.
He then essentially called out Musk’s effort to randomly sample Twitter’s user base for fake activity as flawed, saying it wouldn’t be able to examine the phone number, IP address, and geographic location to each sampled user account. (This tweet prompted the poop emoji.)
Agrawal wrote: “Unfortunately, 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). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs (monetizable daily active users) on any given day.”
“The use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real,” he added. “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.”
Musk didn't limit his trolling to emoji. In one tweet, the Tesla CEO wrote, “Have you tried just calling them?” when Agrawal brought up how Twitter looks at phone number information when sampling its user base for fake accounts.
Musk later added: “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
The back-and-forth occurs as there's growing speculation Musk may try to back out from his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. However, Musk has said he remains committed to acquiring the social media platform. If he does complete the takeover bid, you can expect Agrawal to be replaced after less than a year on the job. According to Reuters, Musk has already lined up a new Twitter CEO.