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I'm surprised the comment here isn't about violating NDA. I'm interested to hear how Musk violates NDA, not whether his bot checking approach is good or bad.

HWR_14 4y ago
I'm confused by your confusion. Pretty clearly, Musk, as acquirer, was made privy to the methodology Twitter uses to estimate and report the number of bot accounts. This methodology is a trade secret, and therefore was disclosed under an NDA. Therefore Musk cannot tell anyone the details (until he buys the company, then he can do whatever he wants). People focused on the bot checking approach because the NDA question is pretty dull and whether he technically did or not depends primarily on how paperwork was filed.
- ergocoder 4y ago
  Wait, you mean that the methodology of sampling 100 followers to check for bot is on the NDA. This is the trade secret of twitter bot checking approach? Wow, this is so mundane.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    NDAs can cover material mundane, dull or arbitrary. A password could be a secret, and it's all those things. The number of users sampled could easily be a trade secret. It's not like the NDA says "keep our secrets unless you think they're too boring to keep". It says "anything marked in the following way is a secret you cannot reveal." If Musk thought that was public knowledge, he could fight them in court. Of course, that would torpedo his "this is new information to me, I need to get out of the TWTR acquisition" claims.
    - ergocoder 4y ago
      I meant it was mundane in the way that any stat new grad could have come up with this methodology. If you give anyone 5 seconds to come up with a methodology to check for bot, they would probably come up with "yeah, let's sample 100 of our followers and check manually". It is the most obvious simplest method that it surprises me twitter can even call this trade secret under NDA.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Here's an example of something more obvious. We have a new finance grad. He comes up with the methodology of "let's take all the corporate profit for the quarter, divide it by the outstanding shares, and distribute it". It's a bit simple, but it's fine. However, if you know that comes out to $7.22/share and announce that ahead of the announcement, you would breach your NDA. It's just a stupid number, but it means something. Similarly, the fact that Twitter used 100, instead of 1000 or 2700 gives you error bars. It means something. Semi-unrelated: a new stat grad would almost certainly not choose 100. They would feel compelled to run some math and come up with a different sample size that matched the results of some equations for power analysis, etc.
        ergocoder 4y ago
        Parag just went on a long twitter thread basically saying that this is not their approach of checking for bots. So, I guess it is not that mundane.

HWR_14 4y ago

I'm confused by your confusion. Pretty clearly, Musk, as acquirer, was made privy to the methodology Twitter uses to estimate and report the number of bot accounts. This methodology is a trade secret, and therefore was disclosed under an NDA. Therefore Musk cannot tell anyone the details (until he buys the company, then he can do whatever he wants). People focused on the bot checking approach because the NDA question is pretty dull and whether he technically did or not depends primarily on how paperwork was filed.

ergocoder 4y ago
Wait, you mean that the methodology of sampling 100 followers to check for bot is on the NDA. This is the trade secret of twitter bot checking approach? Wow, this is so mundane.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  NDAs can cover material mundane, dull or arbitrary. A password could be a secret, and it's all those things. The number of users sampled could easily be a trade secret. It's not like the NDA says "keep our secrets unless you think they're too boring to keep". It says "anything marked in the following way is a secret you cannot reveal." If Musk thought that was public knowledge, he could fight them in court. Of course, that would torpedo his "this is new information to me, I need to get out of the TWTR acquisition" claims.
  - ergocoder 4y ago
    I meant it was mundane in the way that any stat new grad could have come up with this methodology. If you give anyone 5 seconds to come up with a methodology to check for bot, they would probably come up with "yeah, let's sample 100 of our followers and check manually". It is the most obvious simplest method that it surprises me twitter can even call this trade secret under NDA.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Here's an example of something more obvious. We have a new finance grad. He comes up with the methodology of "let's take all the corporate profit for the quarter, divide it by the outstanding shares, and distribute it". It's a bit simple, but it's fine. However, if you know that comes out to $7.22/share and announce that ahead of the announcement, you would breach your NDA. It's just a stupid number, but it means something. Similarly, the fact that Twitter used 100, instead of 1000 or 2700 gives you error bars. It means something. Semi-unrelated: a new stat grad would almost certainly not choose 100. They would feel compelled to run some math and come up with a different sample size that matched the results of some equations for power analysis, etc.
      - ergocoder 4y ago
        Parag just went on a long twitter thread basically saying that this is not their approach of checking for bots. So, I guess it is not that mundane.