Twitter executives reiterated again that fewer than 5 percent of users are spam bots. In response the stock rose as much as 3%.
Twitter officials held a conference call to brief the media in which they said that every quarter the social media giant conducts thousands of manual reviews of user’s accounts to come up with the five percent figure. The company reviews accounts using a myriad of methods, from confirming telephone numbers to analyzing IP addresses. The officials were adamant the company can determine if an account is fake using these techniques.
They further doubled down and stated the number of fake accounts was actually below what they had stated in their SEC filings.
The officials also asserted that the company suspends more than a million spam accounts per day, which is twice the previous number which was claimed in May by CEO Parag Agrawal.
He had said on Twitter, “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—if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).”
Twitter shares rose 3.4% as news of the conference call spread, putting the stock at $39.51, before the gains were pared back. The stock is presently down 9 percent year to date.
If Musk follows through on his purchase offer, each share would be worth 54.20. However in the market, nobody is willing to pay that, because there is a strong perception that Musk is going to back out. Prevailing wisdom is he will cite the number of spam bots, claiming it exceeds what twitter claims, and then he either negotiates a lower price, or he simply pays the $1 billion to back out completely. As this is being written, there are twitter accounts tweeting an unconfirmed rumor Musk will back out, but so far there is no credible source for the assertion.
Like many online content companies, Twitter will prove complicated to monetize however, and it is not clear how Musk plans to actually generate profit from a service where the biggest allure of it is that it is free.
Musk has also been criticizing the company’s censorship policies. He recently tweeted of Twitter banning Psychologist Jordan Petersen, “Yeah, they’re going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”
