Parag Agarwal sides with Elon Musk busting of spam accounts on twitter, Elon Musk reacts with a Poo emoji

In the wake of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal posted a lengthy thread about spam today. Mr. Agrawal detailed Twitter’s “human review” process for suspected spam, to which Mr. Musk responded, “Have you tried just contacting them?” The Tesla CEO also used the emoticon “lump of faeces.”

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022

Mr Musk has recently advocated for the removal of bots from Twitter, as well as a slew of other improvements.

In today’s thread, Mr Agrawal stated that he would discuss spam “with the benefit of data, facts, and context.”

“First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong,” the Twitter CEO said.

“Next, spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So – they are sophisticated and hard to catch,” Mr Agrawal said.

“Some final context: fighting spam is incredibly dynamic. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work! You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not,” he said in the long thread.

“The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface,” Mr 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 – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Mr Musk’s extensive thread on spam comes as he sends confusing messages about his $44 billion takeover, which has been placed “temporarily on hold” due to worries over Twitter’s estimations of the number of bogus accounts or “bots.”

While the accuracy of user statistics is a key metric for evaluating Twitter and other social media companies’ earnings, analysts took Mr Musk’s tweets as an attempt to back out of the transaction or compel a cheaper price.

Mr Musk is the world’s wealthiest individual, according to Forbes, with a fortune of $232 billion, much of it in Tesla stock. Mr Musk, regarded as an iconoclastic genius by his supporters and an unstable megalomaniac by his detractors, startled many investors with his pursuit of Twitter.

Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

 

Mr Musk has stated that his reason for purchasing Twitter stems from a desire to ensure freedom of speech on the platform as well as increase revenue for the service, which is influential in media and political circles but has struggled to achieve profitable growth.

Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Mr Musk stated this week that he supports restoring the ban on former US President Donald Trump, who was thrown from the platform in January 2021 after his efforts to overturn his election result led to the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.