Report: Elon Musk ‘worried’ Twitter has no incentive to fix spam bots

Elon Musk has added to uncertainty over his $44 billion offer for Twitter by saying the price should be cut by the proportion of fake accounts on the platform and calling Twitter’s lack of explanation over its estimates “very suspicious.”

Musk agreed Saturday with conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong who tweeted: “If 25% of the users are bots then the Twitter acquisition deal should cost 25% less.” Musk replied: “Absolutely.”

Musk put his deal to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share “on hold” until the platform could prove that only 5% or less of users are bots.

In a tweet on Saturday, Musk responded to a user who vented about the social media platform’s new spam reporting tool being difficult to use. “I’m worried that Twitter has a disincentive to reduce spam, as it reduces perceived daily users,” Musk said in a reply.

When another user asked if Twitter had replied to him about the changes, Musk implied that the social media platform refused to explain how they calculate their daily users as fake or spam accounts.

“No, they still refuse to explain how they calculate that 5% of daily users are fake/spam,” Musk tweeted. “Very suspicious.”

Recently, Twitter launched a new initiative to handle misinformation on the platform, saying it will stop amplifying and promoting content about crises that are flagged to mislead users and will place warnings on tweets that violate the new policy.

Musk had previously suggested taking a sample of 100 users to determine the number of bots on the platform, allegedly breaking a NDA with Twitter. He replied to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s explanation as to why this wasn’t possible with a poop emoji.

Twitter previously tried to solve the bot problem when their engineers launched an internal initiative called Operation Megaphone, in which they bought hundreds of fake accounts and studied their behavior.

“You grab a species and find others that behave like that species,” said a person familiar with the internal effort, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely describe it. The person said they thought the 5 percent was probably an underestimate. “You’re making predications based on what you’ve observed, but you don’t know what you don’t know.”