By
Bena Ilyas
April 23rd, 2024
Currently, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is “temporarily on hold” as the billionaire is still waiting for the accurate number of spam accounts to see if it is really less than 5 % as the social media company claims.
On Saturday, Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) founder Elon Musk tweeted that the legal team of social media company Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) accused him of violating a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) by disclosing that the sample size for Twitter’s checks on automated users was 100.
Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!
This actually happened.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
Earlier, on Friday, Musk posted a tweet saying that the process of his acquisition of Twitter was “temporarily on hold” as the billionaire was still waiting for the accurate number of spam accounts to see if it is really less than 5 % as the social media company claims.
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
In response to this Tweet, one user asked if Musk could “elaborate on the process of filtering bot accounts.” Further, Musk explained that he took 100 as the sample size number of followers for testing because this is what Twitter does to calculate the proportion of its fake accounts.
Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling.
I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
Following these Tweets, Twitter accused Elon Musk of violating a nondisclosure agreement by sharing this information.
Twitter declined to provide any comments.
Further, Elon Musk also took aim at Twitter’s algorithmic feed. In particular, he was telling users that they are “being manipulated” by Twitter’s algorithmic feed generator. Currently, Twitter offers users two versions of its feed, which are “Latest Tweets” and “Home.” Twitter’s algorithm is generating the latter, while the former shows tweets from accounts a user follows in the order they are sent.
Musk stated:
“I’m not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it’s trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening.”
To solve the issue, Musk recommended switching “Latest Tweet” off.
Elon Musk Acquiring Twitter
Last month, Elon Musk announced his intention to purchase the social media company in a $44 billion deal and take it private for three years. The billionaire has been criticizing Twitter’s policy, saying that it is violating the principles of free speech. As we have reported, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey seemed to approve the deal. However, since announcing the takeover, the Twitter stock has been losing in price.
Investors are showing concerns about the deal with Musk despite the fact that the Board has approved the sale. The social networking company has lost almost 13% since it reached its year-high in April. Besides, there is a $9 billion difference between Twitter’s current valuation and the amount that Musk is paying for the purchase.
Within the deal, Musk aims to “transform” the platform by promoting more free speech and giving users more control over what they see on it. Musk said he wants to “make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.” By taking the company private, the billionaire could work on the service out of sight of the prying eyes of investors, regulators, and others.