Twitter now claims that it removes more than 1 million spam accounts a day.
Twitter executives mentioned its bot removal estimates during a Thursday call briefing reporters on the status of its spam removal efforts. These efforts have been the focus of Elon Musk, who has attempted to halt his acquisition of the social platform due to allegations of underestimating its bot problems.
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The company restated that its spam counts were still under 5%, according to Reuters, an estimate it has maintained over the last two years of quarterly releases. The company also reiterated that it manually examines thousands of accounts at random and uses public and private data to calculate and report the results to shareholders.
The company also maintained that it does not believe its calculations can be replicated via external data.
Twitter’s briefing echoes details unveiled by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who stated in a Twitter thread that the company suspends “over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter.” He also noted that they “lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges,” such as phone verification of captchas.
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Twitter gave Musk a “firehose” of data on June 8 to perform his analysis of the company’s spam bot counts. Musk has previously claimed that 20% or more of Twitter’s users are spam bots, a claim he had made without evidence. Some social media firms have attempted to confirm Musk’s skepticism. An incomplete survey from the social media analytics company GlobalData found that roughly 10% of Twitter users could be spam bots.
While Musk has attempted to imply he would pull out of the deal, Twitter has continued to move forward. The board of directors recommended on June 21 that shareholders vote in favor. Musk also appeared at an all-hands meeting on June 16 before Twitter’s staff, where he answered multiple questions about his plans for the company.
