How Elon Musk plans to find true number of bots on Twitter

Elon Musk has temporarily put on hold his deal to buy Twitter (Illustration: News18)

After hitting pause on his $44 billion Twitter deal, Elon Musk has said he will conduct his own research to determine the number of spam accounts on the microblogging platform.

Musk announced Friday that the Twitter deal was temporarily on hold until there is more information on fake users and bots on the platform. “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” the billionaire chief of Tesla and SpaceX tweeted.

Although Musk followed it up by saying he was still “fully committed” to acquisition, market watchers surmised that he was using fake accounts as an excuse to back out of the deal. The Tesla CEO has now said his team will conduct random sampling of a 100 Twitter users to estimate the number of fake accounts on the site.

“To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter," Musk said, tagging the official handle of Twitter. "I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover,” he added.

To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter.

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I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover … — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022

When asked to elaborate further, Musk obliged. He said that if multiple people found a similar percentage of fake accounts while conducting random sampling, that would be telling.

Elon Musk said he picked 100 as his sample size because that is what Twitter used to calculate its estimate of less than 5 percent of users being bots. Twitter estimated in a filing Monday that spam accounts made up less than 5 per cent of its monetizable daily active users.

Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022