‘Bot or not? The facts about platform manipulation on Twitter.’
Agrawal cleared the air on what exactly these terms are and how the company tackles them. He said the social media platform is ‘incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as possible.’
First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our b… https://t.co/hG5PI1jLei
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) 1652718370000
Moreover, the chief executive also said that Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts every day even before they get noticed on the platform by regular users. “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),” Agrawal added.
“Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter,” he said.
Agrawal further went on to explain, FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam, but behind the scenes, multiple indicators suggest that it’s a real person.
Discover the stories of your interest
“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 tweeted to which Tesla chief Elon Musk replied with an emoticon.
ETtechMusk replied “Have you tried just calling them?” when Agrawal tweeted that the Twitter rules define spam and platform manipulation, and use both public and private data to make a determination on each account.
“There are LOTS of details that are very important underneath this high-level description. We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you,” Agrawal tweeted.
This comes after Musk, who has made weeding out fake Twitter accounts and spambots the central theme of his takeover plan, saying if he buys the social-media platform he
“will defeat the spam bots or die trying”.
Elon Musk on Saturday also tweeted that Twitter Inc’s legal team has accused him of violating a nondisclosure agreement by revealing that the sample size for the social media platform’s checks on automated users was 100.
