Elon Musk is waiting for verification of information that fake accounts and bots actually represent less than 5% of social network users, as there may be more. Twitter shares went down.
Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter has been put on hold “temporarily” after the social media platform revealed that fake or spam accounts comprised for fewer than 5% of its 226 million monetizable daily active users, The Verge reports.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
The Tesla CEO, who proposed $44 billion for Twitter, tweeted a link to a Reuters report on the company’s filing on May 2nd.
Shares of the social media company fell 20% in premarket trading. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company had earlier this month estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its magnetizable daily active users during the first quarter.
It also said it faced several risks until the deal with Musk is closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter.
The statement came only weeks after Twitter revealed that it has been overcounting daily users for the past three years. According to the corporation, a technical problem caused it to identify several accounts as active, resulting in a quarterly user count inaccuracy of up to 1.9 million.
Musk has put cutting the amount of “spam and scam bots” and “bot armies” on Twitter, as well as prioritizing free speech and open-sourcing the platform’s ranking algorithms, a prominent component of his proposal for upgrading the platform.
Forsided, 13.05.2022
Source: The Verge