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https://www.nairaland.com/7124805/elon-musk-says-twitter-deal#112790429

Musk seeks Twitter deal discount, believes 20 percent of accounts are spam

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter can’t move forward unless the company shows public proof that less than 5% of the accounts on the platform are fake or spam.

Musk made the comment in a reply to another user on Twitter early Tuesday. He spent much of the previous day in a back-and-forth with Twitter CEO Paraj Agrawal, who posted a series of tweets explaining his company’s effort to fight bots and how it has consistently estimated that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are fake.

He added that: “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of 5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

At a Miami technology conference Monday, Musk estimated that at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spam bots, a percentage he said was at the low end of his assessment, according to a Bloomberg News report.

Also at the All In Summit, Musk gave the strongest hint yet that he would like to pay less for Twitter than his $44 billion offer made last month.

He said a viable deal at a lower price would not be out of the question, according to the report by Bloomberg, which said it viewed a livestream video of the conference posted by a Twitter user.

While Musk reaffirmed that he is still committed to acquiring Twitter after stating the deal is on hold last week, he also confirmed during his nearly two-hour-long interview that a new price, especially a lower one, would not be far-fetched. Musk reportedly said that the more questions he asks Twitter brass, the more his concerns grow, as he is yet to receive a concrete answer on how many fake or spam accounts are on the platform.

Musk said he believes 20 percent of Twitter accounts are fake or spam, a number that needs to be significantly reduced and could be the reasoning behind his thirst for a renegotiation of terms. Perhaps Twitter is not as valuable with fewer users, of course, and Musk may feel that the already-large asking price of $54.20 per share is simply too high to justify when one-in-five users are not actually humans.

If Musk backs out of the deal, he will be required to pay Twitter a $1 billion termination fee and could be subjected to additional litigation due to damages.

SOURCE

Twitter CEO, Paraga tried to explain the situation surrounding spam bots yesterday but .…...

Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…

First, let me state the obvious: 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.

Next, spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So – they are sophisticated and hard to catch.

Some final context: fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work! You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not.

We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, 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).

The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface.

Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter.

Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.

Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.

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.

The use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real. 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.

Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.

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 on any given day.

There are LOTS of details that are very important underneath this high-level description. We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.

Those who want to learn about bots or not: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/bot-or-not

SOURCE


.......
Musk continued to drag him like I pass my neighbour.'

Ok.

Big man fight

The funny thing is that, none of them can cancel the deal without paying for the consequences.

50% of accounts on nairaland are spam. You see people having up to 4 or more accounts

Perhaps the deal na audio.

wahala news

Rubbish twitter.

Why waste 50bn on a yeye app filled with lies, people fooling themselves and open display of pornography.

The real money man,u won't see real billionaires showing off thier wealth all over social media

wahalur!

Then Elon is not serious of buying Twitter.

There will always be fake accounts which at least should be from 10%.

Like for musk share for bezoz

I taught musk was the one desperately in need to acquire twitter

Wororsiworo

Elon the real G boy ... him don dey price am...

G

Oga buy if you wan buy. If you no wan buy please shift. This is like complaining that the bag of red tomato has one yellow one inside, come dey price am 200 naira.

Is like this Musk man has sense there is no wealth in Twitter business!
Is he looking for excuses to back out

>agrees to a deal to buy Twitter for $45 billion using Tesla equity so he can unban Trump

>Tesla loses $400 billion in market value

>Trump says he’s not returning to Twitter and will instead use his own social media service Truth Social

>Desperately trying to back out

[img]https:///media/4-02-2022/D89bFd.gif[/img]

Lol


Come to Nairaland where 50% account are fake, female gender is used by some silly guys, some are genderless as they swing from male to female at will.... Everyone has an alternative Account even Mods and the owner



.

Somebody should please explain further!!!

This man

iCauseTrouble:
50% of accounts on nairaland are spam. You see people having up to 4 or more accounts

Especially those guys ( actually one person with accounts created on the same date ) supporting Yahaya Bello

hmmmmm

I think Elon is scared of something not known to us all

His attitude change since he twitted about how he can die mysteriously

May be his mantra Free speech is not truly free including for him


MacAfee result still rings a bell

Musk is just looking for an excuse to get out of the deal without having to pay the $1 billion penalty he agreed to if he did so. He's already gotten what he wanted out of the exercise, which was to get attention for himself from "alt right", Trump-worshipping types by "trolling the libs".