The current CEO of Twitter (TWTR), Parag Agrawal, and the to-be CEO, Elon Musk, have locked horns publicly over the fake accounts issue on Twitter. After days of hiatus, Agrawal took to his Twitter handle to put across his views about all the gung-ho surrounding bots.
In a thread of tweets, Agrawal spoke about how spam is hurtful to the experience of real people on Twitter and how it evolves dynamically, making it all the more difficult to spot them. Also, he claimed that Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts daily, even before any of us view them!
Agrawal also stated that Twitter’s “estimate of <5% of monetized daily active users (mDAUs) for the quarter is spam” is based on multiple human reviews, which is again based on certain rules defining spam and platform manipulation using both public and private data, which unfortunately cannot be shared.
Agrawal even shared a link to a Twitter blog dated back to May 2020, which read, “Bot or not? The facts about platform manipulation on Twitter,” for anyone seeking more clarity and information on bots.
His tweet was flooded with sarcasm and suggestions to solve the issue. Meanwhile, Musk, who responded with a “Poop Emoji”, further rebuked Parag in a follow-up tweet, saying, “Have you tried just calling them?” as a way of verifying a user’s authenticity instead of checking data such as phone number, location, etc.
Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy (MSTR) joined the bandwagon advising if Twitter wants to rule out bots, they should ask users “to post $20 security deposit in BTC via Lightning we can lock down comments/DMs to Orange/Blue checks and defeat all the spam bots. @Twitter would make $10 million per day if the spammers continue at the current rate.”
The whole debugging of the spam account issue seems to be a challenging task. No wonder the element of error is always going to be present, even if Musk takes over Twitter.
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