Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Spacex, challenged Twitter’s CEO to a public debate over fake accounts and spambots on the platform. poll revealed that nearly 65% of respondents do not believe that less than 5% of Twitter’s daily users are fake or spam.
Musk Challenges Twitter CEO to Open Debate
Tesla CEO Elon Musk challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a public debate about fake or spam accounts on Twitter. Musk wrote Saturday, “Let me prove to the world that less than 5% of Twitter users are fake or spam users per day.”
The percentage of spam and fake accounts on Twitter is material to Tesla CEO ending his $44 billion bid to buy the social media platform.
Musk’s Twitter Poll on Fake/Spam Users
Musk conducted a 24-hour Twitter poll on Saturday, asking his 103 million followers if they thought less than 5% of Twitter’s daily users were fakes or spam. A total of 822,766 votes were tallied, with 64.9% choosing “no.”
Twitter claims that less than 5% of its daily users are fake or spam accounts, but Musk disagrees and has tried to obtain data from the social media giant to conduct its own analysis, with without success.
Musk explains, ” All indications suggest that some public disclosures about Twitter’s mDAUs are false or grossly misleading … The percentage of fake and spam accounts in the reported mDAU count is wildly higher than 5%.”
Twitter defines mDAUs (monetizable daily active users) as “users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or a Twitter application that can display ads. Twitter’s disclosures include those filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“materially false” SEC filings
Musk alleges that Twitter provided old data, provided a false data set, and then provided a clean data set that had already suspended the malicious accounts.
The Tesla CEO tweeted Saturday.
If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling the 100 accounts and confirming they are authentic, the deal should proceed on its original terms. However, if their SEC filings turn out to be materially false, that is not the case.
In his counterclaim, Musk detailed that three days after signing the deal to acquire Twitter, the social media company “corrected and disclosed that the 2021 10-K mDAU figures were false and that Twitter had overstated mDAU by up to 1.9 million in each quarter.”
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, lev radin