The $44 billion deal on Friday was put on hold by Tesla CEO Elon Musk because of pending details that support the calculation that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5 per cent of users. Musk has come up with a method to determine how many fake accounts there are on Twitter.
Musk said that he's going to do a random sample of 100 followers of twitter.
Musk has invited others to follow the same process and determine the percentage of bots on Twitter. Musk wrote, "I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover."
Moments later, Musk said that bots are angry at being counted.
A Twitter user asked the Tesla CEO How will he define random to. Musk replied: Ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th. I'm open to better ideas If we try to figure out the bot duplicate user percentage, we can probably crowdsource a good answer, said Musk.
Another user asked Musk to elaborate on the process. The user said that Twitter can help you in finding out the real percentage of scam bot accounts. If we try to figure out the bot duplicate user percentage, we can probably crowdsource a good answer, said Musk.
Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If a lot of people get similar results for fake spam duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number because that is what Twitter uses to calculate its sample size.
On May 2, Reuters reported that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.
In its earlier filing, Twitter said it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is done, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter.
The micro-blogging site had 229 million users who were served advertising in the first quarter.
One of his priorities is to remove spam bots from the platform, according to several tweets of late by the world's richest man.