Twitter insists it is removing a million spam accounts each day, as Elon Musk deal goes even more sour
Twitter is blocking more than a million spam accounts each day, it has said as Elon Musk’s attempt to take over the company becomes more bitter.
The company provided more detail on the ways it is trying to reduce the automated accounts that are present on the platform, which are used to distribute spam and scams.
Elon Musk has repeatedly criticised the company for not doing enough on those automated accounts. And he has demanded more information on both the scale of the problem and the solutions for addressing it.
Twitter executives tried to give some of that information in a briefing that revealed new numbers and processes intended to stop the bots’ spread.
The briefing comes after Musk threatened to halt a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter unless the company showed proof that spam and bot accounts were fewer than 5 per cent of users who see advertising on the social media service.
Musk previously tweeted that one of his biggest priorities after acquiring Twitter is to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.”
On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013.
Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said.
The company said it does not believe a calculation of such accounts could be performed externally because it would require private information, but declined to comment on the type of data it would provide to Musk.
Additional reporting by Reuters
