Source: The Business Times
In a filing on Monday, May 2, Twitter Inc estimated the percentage of fake accounts on the platform. They revealed that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5% of the platform’s profitable daily active users at the time of its first quarter. The social media giant reportedly had 229 million users who served advertising in this first quarter.
This revelation from the social media company came just a few days post billionaire Elon Musk bagged a deal to buy it. The Tesla Chief Executive Officer signed the deal to acquire Twitter Inc for $44 billion. Following the takeover, he tweeted on the platform that one of his main priorities would be to eradicate ‘spam bots’ from Twitter. However, this was only one of the concerns he wished to address after acquiring the social media platform.
In the filing, Twitter Inc stated that it faced a significant amount of risks until the closing of the deal with Musk. For example, they faced the challenge of determining of advertisers would go on spending on the platform. Along with it, the issue of ‘potential uncertainty’ surrounding Twitter’s plans and strategies in the future.
Musk’s determination to remove ‘spam bots’:
As we know, Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist wants to get rid of these bots on the platform that bomb users’ content with inappropriate matter. Though this demand did not appear fruitful to critics, Musk would actually end up losing about 50% of his followers in case these bots were eradicated from Twitter. SparkTwo, a Twitter editing tool says that about 44 million of Musk’s followers are bots or automated accounts made to send spam to users. The Tesla CEO referred to the bots issue as the ‘single most annoying problem’ on the platform, promising to get rid of them.
Musk stated how he wanted to make Twitter better by improving it with newer features, turning the algorithms open source to advocate trust. In his statement, he said how this would defeat all ‘spam bots’, and thus authenticate all humans.
Clearly, spam bots can be highly dangerous owing to how most automated accounts are made to spread misinformation. Along with it, they are made to scam users through schemes connected to making profits. Following the introduction of crypto, these spam bots regularly made use of dubious links to empty crypto savings of various people.