'Fundamental To Financial Health Of Twitter': Elon Musk Has A Question As CEO Parag Agrawal Clarifies On Spam

In a series of tweet, Agrawal explained how it is fighting spam and fake accounts with data, facts, and context.

New Delhi: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has finally addressed the issue on spam accounts days after Tesla chief Elon Musk put the Twitter deal on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 per cent of users. In a series of tweet on Monday, Agrawal explained how the micro-blogging platform is fighting spam and fake accounts with data, facts, and context.

"The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So -- they are sophisticated and hard to catch," the Indian-origin CEO argued.

"The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially - are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous - and cause the most harm to our users - can look totally legitimate on the surface," he tweeted.

 “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter,” the CEO wrote.

Responding to Elon Musk's criticism of the company's handling of phony accounts, Agrawal tweeted, “We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).”

Explaining the stance of the company of not being perfect at catching the spams, he said “Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.”

Musk had said his team was busy finding out the presence of fake/spam accounts with the random sampling process.

"Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replication) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years," noted Agrawal.

"Unfortunately, we don't believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can't share). Externally, it's not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day", he added.

Musk, who didn't seem convinced with the explanations responded to the thread with a poop emoji in return and said, "So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter."

So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.

On Monday Twitter shares fell below levels preceding Musk's disclosure of a 9.2 per cent stake in the company in early April. The shares were down 7.7 per cent, at $37.50 a share. That compares to a closing price of $39.31 on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed his stake.