Monday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal posted a lengthy thread on spam accounts on the microblogging platform – an issue that Twitter’s would-be owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has criticized – and tweeted that internal estimates of spam accounts on the service for the past four quarters were “well under 5%”.
Agrawal stated that the estimate cannot be reproduced externally due to the necessity of using both public and private information, to which the CEO of Tesla responded with a pile of feces emoticon.
In a series of tweets, Parag Agrawal, who has been defiant of Twitter’s recent takeover talks, described the company’s “human review” process for identifying spam accounts. He stated that both public and private data were used to determine the same, to which Musk replied, “Have you tried simply calling them?”
Combating fake accounts has been a cornerstone of Musk’s effort to reform Twitter, which was his primary motivation for purchasing the platform. Musk revealed in a statement announcing his deal that he desired to defeat spam bots, authenticate all humans, and make the algorithms open source.
Twitter currently permits bots, though according to the company’s policy such accounts are required to disclose that they are automated. The platform has even created a label for “good” bots, such as the self-care reminder bot @tinycarebot. However, spambots are prohibited, and the company has policies in place to combat them.
Musk has also expressed a desire to make the platform a bastion of free speech by eliminating content moderation. Last week, however, the much-discussed Twitter deal fell flat when Tesla’s CEO said the takeover was “on hold” but he remains committed.
In a series of Friday afternoon tweets, Agrawal stated that while he expected the deal to close, the company must be “prepared for all scenarios.”
The CEO had stated, “I will not use the deal as an excuse to avoid making important decisions for the health of the company, and neither will any other Twitter executive.”
