By Reuters | Updated: 16 May 2022
Elon Musk on Saturday tweeted that Twitter’s legal team 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.
“Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!” tweeted Musk, chief executive of electric car maker Tesla.
Musk on Friday tweeted that his $44-billion (roughly Rs. 3,41,910 crore) cash deal to take the company private was “temporarily on hold” while he awaited data on the proportion of its fake accounts.
He said his team would test “a random sample of 100 followers” on Twitter to identify the bots. His response to a question prompted Twitter’s accusation.
When a user asked Musk to “elaborate on process of filtering bot accounts,” he replied: “I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5 percent fake/spam/duplicate.”
Musk tweeted during the early hours of Sunday that he is yet to see “any” analysis that shows that the social media company has fake accounts less than 5 percent.
He later said that “There is some chance it might be over 90 percent of daily active users.”
Meanwhile, Musk, who has made weeding out fake Twitter accounts and spam bots the central theme of his takeover plan, said if he buys the social-media platform he “will defeat the spam bots or die trying”. He has constantly blamed the company’s over-reliance on advertising for the relentless spread of spam bots.
Twitter, like other social media companies, has been battling spam bots over the past few years through software that spots and blocks them. Spam bots or fake accounts are designed to manipulate or artificially boost activity on social media platforms such as Twitter.
