Tweet or Dare: Will Real Users Stand Up?

Elon Musk has put his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on hold till he is assured spam accounts on the media platform are less than 5% of users. He intends to randomly sample 100 followers on Twitter and has asked others to try this exercise to determine if its claims on fake accounts are credible. Fighting bots, alongside authenticating all humans and making Twitter's algorithms open source are key to his efforts to lessen content moderation on the platform. Questions over how many users it actually has are relevant to Twitter's valuation. The prospects of restating years of user numbers, and of Musk selling his current holding in Twitter if he can't pull off the acquisition, could signal a repricing of the deal.

Twitter has rules and policing in place to weed out spam bots that manipulate activity. The company regards manipulation as involving misinformation and does not permit overlapping accounts, bulk registration, coordinated activity to generate engagement and trading in followers. Twitter uses machine learning and investigators to sift through its user database for suspicious activity and to freeze dodgy accounts. Not all bots on the platform are, however, considered malicious. Automated amplification of, say, Covid updates are permitted as long as the accounts are suitably labelled. Musk has also tweeted about how the Twitter algorithm could be manipulating users. These are fair points about Twitter in particular, and digital media in general.

Musk's query into the integrity of Twitter's numbers raises the bar for due diligence of social media platforms that can deploy technology to amplify their reach - and advertising revenue. Assessing how many individuals, and not strings of code, are daily or monthly active users is fundamental to valuing platforms that seek to extract every last bit of the network effect. Musk is seeking funding commitments for the Twitter acquisition from well-heeled investors to avoid borrowing against his Tesla holdings. This widens the pool of scrutineers into Twitter's monetisable users.