In a call with executives Thursday during a briefing aimed at shedding more light on the company fake and bot accounts as it tussles with Elon Musk over "spam bots," Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts every day.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has threatened to withdraw his offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion if the company cannot show that less than 5% of its daily active users are automated spam accounts.
Musk has argued, without providing evidence, that Twitter has vastly underestimated the number of "spam bots" — automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation — on its platform.
Twitter stated during the call that spam accounts account for less than 5% of its active user base each quarter. Twitter said it reviews "thousands of accounts" sampled at random to determine whether an account is real, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation, and how the account behaves when it is active.
Private data, which is not publicly available and thus not included in Musk data "firehose," includes IP addresses, phone numbers, and location. According to Twitter, such private information aids in avoiding the misclassification of legitimate accounts as spam.
For years, fake social media accounts have been a source of concern. Advertisers base their spending decisions on the number of users provided by social media platforms. Spam bots are also used to spread misinformation and amplify messages.
However, Twitter stated during the conference call that not all automated accounts are malicious bots. It released a label for automated accounts last year to identify what the company refers to as "good bots," such as accounts that send news, health, or weather updates.
Twitter and its investors are well aware of the issue of fake accounts. For years, the company has disclosed its bot estimates to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, while also warning that its estimate may be too low.
According to multiple reports at the time, Twitter offered Musk access to its "firehose" of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets last month, though neither the company nor Musk confirmed this.