Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday once again raised the presence of fake/spam accounts or ‘bots’ on Twitter, saying the micro-blogging platform has ‘very bot-friendly’ rules.
Musk has put the $44 billion Twitter buyout on hold till its CEO Parag Agrawal tells him the exact percentage of bots on the platform. Twitter currently says less that 5 per cent of accounts on its platforms can be fake.
A follower tagged Musk, posting “current technical Twitter Limits”: “None of these @Twitter limits are aligned with the goal of human-to-human interactions @elonmusk.”
“Like 1 tweet every 36 seconds during 24 hours is not human behaviour. Neither is changing your account’s email address 4 times per hour,” the follower asked Musk.
The Tesla CEO replied: “Totally, these are very bot-friendly rules!”
According to Twitter’s technical limits, the limit for Direct Messages (DMs) is 1,000 messages per day, while the limit for tweets is 2,400 per day.
The “change to account email” is 4 per hour and the technical “follow limit” is 400 per day.
Musk has requested that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigate whether Twitter’s claim about its user base is correct.
While Twitter stated in an SEC filing that less than 5% of its monetisable daily active users (mDAUs) are bots, Musk believes the number is four times higher.
Musk stated that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey publicly refused to show proof of less than 5% bots.
“20 per cent fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be much higher. My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Musk wrote.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of less than 5 per cent. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” he had added.
Musk stated this month at a conference in Miami that Twitter could have at least four times the number of fake accounts revealed in its filing.
