The CEO of Twitter Inc TWTR shared his take about spam on the social media platform, likely in response to comments from Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk.
What Happened: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wants to address spam with 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,” Agrawal tweeted.
Agrawal said advanced spam campaigns use humans and automation and can compromise real accounts, making them hard to catch.
“Fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work!”
The Twitter CEO said rules to detect spam have to be constantly changing.
“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you ever even see them on Twitter.”
Agrawal said millions of accounts are locked each week that can’t pass human verification tests such as captchas or phone verification. Some accounts that are real people can look “fake superficially.”
Some spam slips through and the company estimates that less than 5% of reported monetizable daily active users each quarter are spam accounts.
“Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data," Agrawal said.
Related Link: 5 Things You Might Not Know About New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal
Musk Responds: Musk, who is in the process of acquiring Twitter, replied to Agrawal with his take on the spam issue.
Along with a response suggesting to call users, Musk replied with a poop emoji to Agrawal’s Twitter thread.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter?” Musk asked Agrawal.
Musk later tweeted several comments that were likely a public response to Agrawal’s thread.
“Not to mention potential bugs in the code. Open source is the way to go to solve both trust and efficacy,” Musk tweeted.
Musk also said the algorithm is trying to guess what people might want to read and in return is manipulating viewpoints without users realizing it’s happening.
Last week, Musk said his acquisition of Twitter for $54.20 was “temporarily on hold” due to spam/fake accounts potentially representing more than 5% of users. He later said he was still committed to the acquisition, but would be sampling a collection of 100 random Twitter followers.
Twitter ended the first quarter with 229 million monetizable daily active users.
TWTR Price Action: Twitter shares are down 6% to $38.25 on Monday.
Photo: Created with an image from Web Summit on Flickr
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