Tesla and Spacex CEO Elon Musk has challenged Twitter’s CEO to a public debate over the platform’s fake accounts and spam bots. Musk conducted a recent survey and found that nearly 66% of those surveyed believed that less than 5 percent of Twitter’s daily users were spammers or fakes.
Musk Challenges Twitter’s CEO to Public Debate
Tesla CEO Elon Musk challenged Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO to engage in a debate on fake and spam Twitter accounts. “Let him prove to the public that Twitter has less than 5% fake or spam daily users,” Musk wrote Saturday.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, ended his $44-billion bid to acquire the social media company. This was due in large part to the fact that there were a lot of spammers and false accounts on Twitter.
Twitter sued Musk in an attempt to get him to agree to the buyout. In a countersuit filed by Musk, the Spacex boss accused Twitter of fraud.
Musk’s Twitter Poll on Fake/Spam Users
Musk ran a Twitter poll asking his 103,000,000 followers whether they believe less than 5 percent of Twitter users are spam or fake. A total of 822,766 votes were counted: 64.9% picked “no.”
Twitter says that less than 5 percent of daily users are spam accounts. Musk, however, disagrees and has tried to get data from Twitter to perform his own analysis.
Musk explained: “All indications suggest that several of Twitter’s public disclosures regarding its mDAUs are either false or materially misleading … The proportion of false and spam accounts included in the reported mDAU count is wildly higher than 5%.”
Twitter defines mDAUs (monetizable daily active users) as “users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.” Twitter’s disclosures include those filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
‘Materially False’ SEC Filings
Musk asserts that Twitter supplied him with old data, provided a fake set of data, then gave him a new set of data where they had already suspended malicious accounts.
Tesla CEO Tweeted Saturday
If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms. But, it is not appropriate to proceed if their SEC filings turn out to be false.
Musk detailed in his countersuit that three days after he signed the agreement to buy Twitter, the social media company “restated and publicly disclosed that the mDAU figures in the 2021 10-K were false and that Twitter had overcounted mDAU by up to 1.9 million in each quarter.”
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