Twitter chief says the company suspends over half a million spam accounts each day as Elon Musk puts his acquisition deal on hold

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Twitter chief says the company suspends over half a million spam accounts each day as Elon Musk puts his acquisition deal on hold
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  • Parag Agrawal has defended the company’s claim of spam accounts on the platform.
  • The Twitter chief claimed that they are doing everything they can to detect and eliminate spam accounts.
  • Elon Musk responded to these tweets with a “smiling poop” emoji.
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Twitter chief Parag Agrawal posted a series of tweets defending the company and talking about the spam accounts on its platform. This comes just a few days after Tesla cofounder Elon Musk had put his Twitter acquisition deal on hold pending an investigation of fake or spam users.

Several people have claimed that Musk has put the deal on hold to get the platform at a better price. Musk has himself said that a lower price was “not out of the question”.

Spam is hard to catch


Parag Agrawal began his tweets by saying that Twitter is “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can” as spam accounts harm the experience of real users on Twitter and therefore the company’s business.

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He then added that advanced spam campaigns use a combination of humans and automation to evade detection, making them sophisticated and hard to catch.

Agrawal also added that tactics used by spam accounts evolve constantly. “You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not,” Agrawal said.

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Revealing the number of accounts banned by the company, Agrawal said,” We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam.”

Coming to the 5% number that was reported by Twitter and disputed by Musk, Agrawal said,” Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slip through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.”

Agrawal claimed that it is not possible to share the information required to calculate the spam accounts publicly. However, the company has shared an “overview of the estimation process” with Musk.

Musk replied to Agrawal’s tweets with a “smiling poop” emoji, which received over 41,000 likes in a short duration.
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