22 ms·

Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or spam

508 points by iamflimflam1 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago
Doesn't matter. People should actually read the Twitter filing. Could be closer to 50% and it wouldn't be enough for Musk to back out. Also, the word bot can have many definitions. A company using an app to schedule tweets could be considered a bot.
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
Elon already knew this of course. Buying Twitter was just an excuse to sell Tesla stock at a peak while avoiding suspicion. Now he’s teeing up his excuse to pull out. /conspiracy
- Fargoan 4y ago
  This is what I was thinking too. People would panic if he sold that much stock. But if he's just taking out a loan to buy another company it's no big deal.
- MrMan 4y ago
  Occams razor is not a conspiracy
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Billionaires making bold plays while backed by a cadre of top lawyers and accountants the kind of "conspiracy" that is totally expected.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I don't think this is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation is this: Musk's primary source of financing is Tesla stock. The sudden market downturn took a big chunk out of Tesla stock, which made his financial situation more difficult. The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position much easier. Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of the tech market. It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in valuation.
    - MrMan 4y ago
      I just find it hard to believe Musk really wants to own and run twitter, he seems to actively hate it and is trying to tank its value.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  /shrug Pump and dump is Elon's raison d'être. Idk why people keep falling for his bs.
  - avs733 4y ago
    because he is rich - therefore smarter than everyone else.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    Elon pledges Tesla stock as collateral, Tesla stock goes down. Announces deal 'on hold', Tesla stock goes up. Unless he can get the price of Twitter down to where he does not have to use Tesla as collateral, its just a bad purchase decision.
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  Or negotiate a better price?
- closedloop129 4y ago
  Or he actually wants to own Twitter and drives up its value by making Twitter known to every person on the internet. Bad news are good news. It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good investment.
efsavage 4y ago
64.56432% of significant digits are misused.
- ralusek 4y ago
  Your mental random number generator, or the keys you're willing to type one handedly for a bit, represent only 50% of the 10 Arabic numerals in use today.
  - yboris 4y ago
    With only 7 digits typed, we would expect at least some repetition ;) The chance of no digit repeating out of 7 would be about 20%
  - dylan604 4y ago
    With a proper keyboard including a 10-key, I can reach all 10 of those Arabic numerals with one hand. I find your logic equally as flawed as the statistic. You sir, must be a spambot account!
hamiltonians 4y ago
not a surprise at all.
seydor 4y ago
Nice try Elon, afaik twitter did disclose that they might be undercounting spam at 5% it s very hard to say anything about bots without IP addresses. The most active bots get sold / change subject etc.
wnevets 4y ago
and so it begins
gone35 4y ago
"70.23% of @ElonMusk followers are unlikely to be authentic, active users who see his tweets." Somewhat alarming, if accurate.
- ramblerman 4y ago
  They define active as having tweeted in the last 90 days. I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or their assumptions are a bit off. Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article): 1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently 2) Accounts with low number of tweets 3) Accounts with a low number of followers 4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority of twitter users don't tweet very much. 25% of Twitter Users Produce 97% of All Tweets: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    I am the same, in fact my account has never posted a thing ever, never liked at thing ever, I just follow people I want to see updates from that is all. I treat it like RSS not Social Media
    - phpisatrash 4y ago
      Look my username
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    With Twitters' changes to ask people to log in to see most content the number of lurkers probably shot up.
  - loceng 4y ago
    I'm now wondering what % of overall tweets are from that 1/5th of bots. If it's 1-1 then 20% of tweets being from bots isn't great - but it could even be more than that.
Jyaif 4y ago
Assuming that's true, would that mean that Elon has a way out that does not involve paying 1B$ ?
- MrMan 4y ago
  No
- matdehaast 4y ago
  AFAIK he doesn't even have a way out of paying the full buying price. The breakup fee does not allow him to abritarly invoke it. It is only conditional on finance, of which the banks have already given binding commitments. Matt Levine has a great article on it [1]. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk TL;DR is that it may or may not be enough to justify it in court if Twitter sues, but it probably is enough to make a court case necessary, and Twitter's board may be reluctant to spend years in court trying to win their case, since inevitably the court case would involve the very public airing of facts like this that would not paint Twitter in a good light.
  - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
    Aside: Patrick Boyle's humor is always spot on. Love that channel.
    - rossdavidh 4y ago
      Absolutely agreed.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    And would block any possible future deal, with Elon or anybody else until that court case was resolved.
MrMan 4y ago
Musk should have hired these people before he waived due diligence
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I'm loathe to invoke "4D Chess" but I can't help but think this may have been a tactical decision to either lower the price of Twitter before the purchase, or to impugn its reputation without actually buying the company.
  - rglover 4y ago
    My speculation: it was to make sure the data was pure when he uses it to train the Tesla Bot AI.
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    To lower the price that he set after choosing to not run his due diligence? It’s possible, sure, but not likely.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      Could be a tool for renegotiation, but then again I know very little about these kind of high stakes corporate acquisitions.
imchillyb 4y ago
This is /exactly/ why Mr. Musk has required the board to prove their math. The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares, is predicated upon human users on their system and not spam accounts. Twitter's valuation of its stock is way-overblown if there are 20% bot accounts on their platform. Go Elon!
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Elon hasn’t required the board to do anything. He signed an agreement to purchase the company with no due diligence or backout clauses. If he tries to get out now he’ll see Twitter in court.
  - lmeyerov 4y ago
    If they lied on SEC filings about this, he bought something not as advertised, so I'm not so sure...
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Have you even read the SEC filings cause if you had you probably wouldn't be parroting that?
      - lmeyerov 4y ago
        I thought the SEC filings both have a number and a risk of being wrong? Re:parroting, while that seems to have been a pejorative, I wasn't actually copying from anywhere, just a smb executive sensitive to this sort of thing during m&a as standard business discussions, so it's interesting that it's being repeated enough to accuse people here of 'parrot'ing!
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        There is no hard number. It mentions that they are just an estimate and could be off. They are labeled as MAUs, so that gives a lot of leniency depending on how "active" they are. It doesn't define bots either. The SEC filings thing has been repeated even by Musk himself. It doesn't really help him.
rossdavidh 4y ago
"Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others..." If the figures for Elon Musk and Donald Trump's followers are at all accurate, it's over 50% for large accounts. Which means that the people who probably care most about whether or not their followers are real (e.g. those who might be charged for the privilege of using Twitter to communicate with large numbers easily), are the ones most likely to have mostly bots. I could see why this might impact the value of Twitter as a company.
Proven 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xwowsersx 4y ago
I am guessing that it makes sense that very high profile people will have a higher percentage of fake followers than an ordinary, small account would because many of these fake accounts are bots that are set up in order to get attention for whatever they're selling or promoting by interacting with high profile accounts.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Well, there are different bots for different purposes. A bot operated to post advert messages might want to post them on high profile accounts. A bot for a "500 followers for $5" company might be more likely to follow low-profile accounts, with some random activity/follows thrown in as camouflage. A bot operated to amplify certain messages/opinions might follow accounts of middling visibility, and focus on likes rather than more visible activity.
  - xwowsersx 4y ago
    Good points
gentleman11 4y ago
I signed up with a vpn and got banned for life after a single nonsense tweet about not liking the feed and following 4-5 famous people. I don’t think bot detection techniques are very robust > This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t). In other words, their model performs well on their training set, and they don’t acknowledge that it may be over fitted or mislabeled, and they hand wave mistakes
- fivre 4y ago
  they're robust at generating false positives! i got insta-locked for, i think, signing up using my own email domain, to make an account that shares pictures i took of geese. it took about 4 months to wait for them to unlock it meanwhile, saudi bot armies apparently basically run rampant across the platform
- DerekBickerton 4y ago
  I'm 6 months into my account and they still haven't asked for a phone number. I mean, I have one ready if they ask for it. Maybe I've been whitelisted as a non-bad-faith actor due to my timezone and other factors.
- joering2 4y ago
  Its get even worse than that. I have a test account with about 10,000 followers (mostly real people, you can tell), created via home-used IP, and few days after Musk tweet comparing Gates to Emoji of pregnant man, I did exact same tweet! With exact same punctuation, images, icons, everything. Less than 2 days later I am banned for "spewing hatred based on sex, gender or religion". No amount of replies that my tweet was same as another but much much more popular account helped. Banned for life.
mherdeg 4y ago
Interesting to think about: > Our systems do not, however, attempt to identify Twitter accounts that may be irregularly operated by a human but have some automated behaviors (e.g. a company account with multiple users, like our own @SparkToro, or a community account run by a single person, like Aleyda Solis’ @CrawlingMondays). We cannot know how Twitter (or Mr. Musk) might choose to classify these accounts, but we bias to a relatively conservative interpretation of “Spam/Fake.” So this means: * @EmojiAquarium - spam/fake * @threateningcake - not spam/fake * @CanYouPetTheDog - spam/fake * @ChuckGrassley - not spam/fake (?? - what fraction are staff generated vs Chuck?) * @Wendys - spam/fake * @Twitter - spam/fake
durnygbur 4y ago
So politicians and rich are announcing new laws and their stuff mostly to bots while a casual visitor sees a login wall. Nice. Throw it to a volcano with IG, FB and remaining American "internet" 1/8
morsch 4y ago
"We undercount active users whose accounts are protected, accounts that view tweets but don’t send any, and accounts that log in and engage in other ways beyond tweeting (like favoriting or adding profiles to lists)." My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio between lurkers and active posters. Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and, these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother customizing their profile.
- avs733 4y ago
  so much of this thread is 'proof' that supports whatever elon musk is trying to do, but seems to not realize this is a totally independent actor making a dubious set of assumptions to come to a number. This analysis might be interesting because it is timely but it has no bearing on the musk twitter acquisition anymore than me running such an analysis does.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Yeah, I never knew I was a bot. I thought I just had a passing interest in a few people on Twitter and not much of interest to share of my own.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    Yep, me too.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    That's because you took the blue pill.
  - tinsmith 4y ago
    I remember when I found out I was a bot. It was during a harrowing judgement conflict with an image-based captcha about traffic lights, and caused a complete shutdown of my higher order processes. To this day, I still don't know the threshold of how much traffic light actually needs to be in a square to be considered for selection, so I just stopped logging in to everything.
waynecochran 4y ago
Says a user named "Followerwonk" ... to be fair, they do profer a method for reproducing their results. I am guessing that there are some bots they are missing ... ones that are close to passing the Turing Test.
lapcat 4y ago
My personal impression from using Twitter for years is that the actual number may be twice as high, more like 40% than 20%. The researchers repeatedly say that they were very conservative in their estimates and only counted accounts that were extremely likely to be spam. "This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t)." PROTIP: You can search Twitter by URL. Just search for a popular news article on Twitter, and you can see the massive number of obviously non-human accounts who are tweeting the article.
542458 4y ago
I don't think this post means as much as people are acting like it does. The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality. Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  I think I match all of them and I too am a trustworthy human, fellow human.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Exactly what a bot would say.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      hah ha, fellow human, how we love to jape!
- brandall10 4y ago
  I match these as well, though I'm not an active user.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Seriously. Having a URL in your bio is suspicious IMHO.
g-clef 4y ago
Oh, do I have notes on their methodology. 1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive. This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their results. 2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as monetizable as high-volume posters.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always vastly outnumber people who post content on any platform. If lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5% and twitter’s “<5%” figure is accurate.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority, creates a sort of echo chamber. I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fullshark 4y ago
  And yet I find 20% more believable then under 5% Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.
jeffbee 4y ago
Why would a uniform sample of Twitter accounts be even remotely interesting? My Twitter experience consists of people I personally know. None of them are bots. If you took a random sample of websites you'd find that 99.995% of them are spam. That's why we have to rank search results.
severino 4y ago
So ~20% of Twitter accounts are fake; however, the last time I tried to create a Twitter account for legitimate purposes (asking some customer questions) I couldn't, just because I didn't want Twitter to have my phone number.
- alaricus 4y ago
  I don't have a Twitter account exactly for this reason. No Twitter, you are not getting my phone number.
alaricus 4y ago
tiffanyh 4y ago
How does Elon benefit by NOT acquiring Twitter?
coldcode 4y ago
I check everyone I follow (mostly artists) to see if they are posting art generally, and look at most of the people who follow me to see what they do before following them back. There are a few (legit) retweeting bots and I have ignored a bunch of people because they did not seem real. I remember a set of accounts followed me that had (1) no tweets (2) avatar pic of MCU movie actor and (3) hundreds of followers.
fullstackchris 4y ago
Why are we always "surprised" by this?
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance. Their activities range from peddling propaganda and disinformation to those attempting to sell products, induce website clicks, push phishing attempts or malware, manipulate stocks or cryptocurrencies, and (perhaps worst) harass or intimidate users of the platform." My perception of Twitter is that some of the worst behavior on Twitter is coming from the 'well-respected authentic accounts of government and media personalities', particularly when it comes to disinformation, marketing, and indeed, intimidation of those with non-conformant opinions on various topics, such as, for example, the wisdom of unconditionally flooding Ukraine with high-tech ordnance in the name of repelling the Russian invasion (or is that really more about delivering a cash cow to US weapons manufacturers)? That's the kind of thing that could lead to doxing by corporate media reporters and charges of being 'a Russian asset' even if such concerns are reasonable. Also, how many of the 'registered authentic accounts' include tweets not written by the actual personality they claim to represent, but rather by some kind of in-house PR/image management consultants? Just because there's a paid human somewhere in the chain doesn't mean the account is all that 'authentic'.
schleck8 4y ago
Go through this comment section, you won't believe it https://mobile.twitter.com/McDonalds/status/1521143128073424897 https://mobile.twitter.com/McDonalds/status/1521143128073424...
mk89 4y ago
The question would be ... how much will Elon Musk pay to buy Twitter after pointing out that their business is essentially a bunch of bots, etc.? Kind of "hey guys, look, I really think your platform costs around 52$ per share, but ... let's try to see the actual price. How many bots do you have again? :)" Whenever this guy speaks, a whole freaking market moves. It's like "cleaning up the mess" even before joining the company as their CEO. In the worst case scenario, he dodged a huge bullet. So, who cares.
sschueller 4y ago
What kind of idiot would attempt a purchase of such magnitude before doing his due diligence (obviously, no one, it's an excuse after the price collapsed)? For fs some people probe fruit for a minute until they decide it's worthy a purchase. How many more of these types of "events" until people stop treating Elon like some super genius god? Stop giving/loaning him money enabling this garbage.
- FargaColora 4y ago
  Did you read the article, or even these comments on the article? Nothing supports what you say at all. Of course it's easier just to shout about the billionaire man.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Did you read the HN guidelines? If not then I would invite you to do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Which guideline is the OP's comment breaking?
      - kazinator 4y ago
        This one: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
        systemvoltage 4y ago
        Spot on!
- deelowe 4y ago
  This seems intentional to me. Musk has been claiming there's a bot/troll problem on social media for quite some time. I think he knew this going in.
mattzito 4y ago
This study is a great example of how you can use the data you have available to talk yourself into your conclusions. The implicit point of the study is to refute the "5% of Twitter accounts are spam" stat from Twitter's 10-Q that was the basis of his putting the twitter acquisition "on hold". Except - the baseline that they choose is entirely NOT comparable to that of Twitter's baseline. The study says: > Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU). Except that we know what Twitter defines as a monetizable DAU: > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. Nothing about posting, nothing about engagement at all - simply: were you able to see an ad? So there isn't any reason to claim that this "might" represent what Twitter uses as an mDAU - we know, in fact, that is not how they measure it. A more honest statement would have been: "We selected a random sample of (etc. etc.). We believe that this sample is large enough to be significantly significant, however, it can not be compared to Twitter's mDAU set, as it does not count passive consumers of Twitter content. Instead, this data can be used to suggest that a significant amount of the total posted content on Twitter is delivered by bots" My guess is the number of consumers of content is greater than the posters of content by several orders of magnitude, though some of that would be mitigated by the longer time horizon.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  The whole thing is BS. Twitter could have easily got an accurate number if they wanted to. And Elon could have forced them to do that as part of the deal or done a decent job on his own before the offer. Both sides are bullshitting to negotiate a better price.
  - mattzito 4y ago
    The only one bullshitting is Elon Musk - that 5% number has been in Twitter's 10-Q for literally years. Here's the 10-Q from Q3 2020: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/cb1d93d5-13d2-4d03-96b4-c90efe5ac5fc.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/cb1d93d... "We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the third quarter of 2020 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter" This is not a new stat or new information.
tmaly 4y ago
That is a 0.03% sample size of the total 130+ million accounts. I was just explaining the law of small numbers to my daughter for her science fair. I think this would qualify.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  Maybe someday she'll explain to you that errors in sample estimates depend only on sample size and not population size.
  - tmaly 4y ago
    I think the bigger error is still in drawing conclusions from a small sample size.
    - bigbillheck 4y ago
      You're going to have decently sized error bars from a n=100 sample but it doesn't matter if it was 10% of a population of 1000 or 0.001% of a population of 10000000, the quality of the estimate is just as good.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Four significant digits? That's a lot of confidence.
ladyattis 4y ago
It's funny since I've had folks claim I must be a bot because I follow more folks than I have following me. It's just weird how these folks create metrics without much of a decent explanation. The fact of the matter is that bots are a problem that I think can only really be managed but not eliminated. The first thing is to make it botting not something that should be punished from the start but something that is used for common automated purposes just like how Twitter does it now with some bots being tagged as such for legitimate reasons but not blocked or shadowbanned.
- alaricus 4y ago
  I've been told that I'm a bot because I express views that deviate from the accepted consensus.
jacobrussell 4y ago
I think I've missed something here. Why would Elon not want to buy twitter if it has >5% spam accounts? Isn't the number of fake accounts one of the reasons he wanted to buy it in the first place? I don't understand why this would make him want to back out. It doesn't seem to be in conflict with any of the reasons he wants to buy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 4y ago
  You are reading his reasoning on face value. It is suggested that the reason is a ruse to back away from the original deal in that he either wants to renegotiate the price or walk away completely.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    Given how all other tech stocks are fareing right now, he definitely wants to renegotiate. It will be interesting to see what the boards does. Right now Musk is the only thing holding up their stock price. And if they hold him to paying the billion, he's just going to carp from the sidelines. Maybe they should let him out of deal, but close his account?
    - Traster 4y ago
      The problem for the twitter board was that no one else was interested at the valuation. The problem for Musk is that if he walks away first he has to pay $1bn - which he doesn't want to do, and second that if he comes back the board can find someone else to buy it, or just say no to him on the basis that he's not acting in good faith.
- alaricus 4y ago
  He has to pay 1 billion to Twitter if he backs down from the deal. This could be a way to get out of paying that.
andsome 4y ago
It seems the stated number is inflated by the hand of Elite's to increase the probability of the 'heard' moving back to Twitter.. over-looking Truth Social.. and crashing the one best chance of global free-speech rights surviving in an ever growing communist bound society.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
"I used to not be into bitcoin, until I met the right trader!" ...
LargeWu 4y ago
I think it's instructive to note the difference between 'fake' accounts and 'spam'/'bot' accounts. 'Fake' accounts exist to fraudulently increase follower count. This is what the study is claiming to measure. These typically have low activity and engagement profiles. 'Spam' or 'bot' accounts, on the other hand, generally have high activity. Whether trying to influence political opinions, or engaging in astroturfing or phishing activities. They probably have very, very high ratios of replies to original tweets, and overall tweets to # followers.
redmen 4y ago
20%? That's it?
phendrenad2 4y ago
Does this take into account deleted or banned accounts? Maybe that's not significant, but maybe it is.
Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
Seems like both parties will see each other in court. Which is home field advantage for Musk really, considering what he got away with in the past.
oversocialized 4y ago
da39a3ee 4y ago
I'm sorry to be one of those people, but the low-contrast grey color used for the text is really annoying and makes me feel like I'm straining my eyes to read it! Why the fuck do designers encourage this? It is more readable as black, and I have a vague non-medically-informed sense that it might be better for people.
_joel 4y ago
I thought it'd be higher than that tbf
LNSY 4y ago
This estimate seems very low
mgas 4y ago
You only need to see who the author of this post is to know that the methodology is crap, the numbers are likely made up (19.42% is WAY too specific), and the post is just a grab for media attention on the coattails of some other internet meme garbage. This guy (Rand Fishkin) has been selling SEO as a religion for the better part of this century, and is in no small part responsible for all the search-result-garbage style websites everyone is complaining about elsewhere on HN today and every other day. He's a third-rate market-bro hack that's been taking advantage of web professionals who get thrown into SEO/Marketing jobs and have no idea what they're doing by relentlessly shoving half-assed corporate strategies through moz.com and now his new sparktoro.com, and calling himself the great SEO redeemer. Wanna question his methodology? There is none. Wanna question his science? Totally devoid.
- seydor 4y ago
  well if his science is SEO he seems to be good at it
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is absolutely standard when third parties discuss Twitter spam. There is an astounding amount of academic research doing the same thing with methodologies just as silly. https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  19.42 is a number rounded to 2dp. They rounded to "nearly 20" for the headline. I'm not sure how they could express things differently in this regard.
blenderdt 4y ago
The real question is: does it matter?
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I ran a small social network. These are active accounts. But active accounts usually are a small percentage of total accounts, especially when it comes to bot networks, because bot spammers usually create huge quantities of accounts in advance, so that as soon as one bot goes down, another spins up to take its place. I'd be surprised if 80% of the total accounts on twitter aren't bots.
justinpombrio 4y ago
If all you want to know is what fraction of all twitter accounts are spam accounts, it should be really easy: 1. Select 1000 accounts uniformly at random. Either from among all twitter accounts, or from active twitter accounts for whatever definition of "active". 2. Classify these 1000 by hand. Do as much investigation into them as you need to classify them accurately; no need to use heuristics here. You will (with very high probability) get an estimate accurate to within a percent or so. If you do statistics you could find the actual bounds.
- alaricus 4y ago
  How do you get 1000 acounts at random? Does twitter have an API for it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ianbooker 4y ago
    The stream API can sample, but then you see currently active accounts only. Users are denoted by numerical ID, you can sample using this.
bwagy 4y ago
Twitter isn't claiming of all its accounts less than 5% are bots. It is claiming less than 5% of their mDAU are. Without exposure to their methodology we are just speculating. It is entirely feasible that at any point in time 20% of accounts are bots. It is whether they have counted them in their mDAU that matters.
Phil_Latio 4y ago
I signed up at Twitter 9 years ago and use it every day, but have less than 50 tweets. Either you want to engage in discussion (to a varying degree) or you simply don't. But the latter doesn't necessarily mean you don't observe the discussion. Of course an active Twitter account can be one that never tweeted in 10 years. Such an account may as well see advertisements etc... So I think any outside studies are fundamentally flawed since they don't have access to internal data like last login time.
TheBlight 4y ago
Sounds low.
gzer0 4y ago
This doesn't come as a surprise; I was able to buy 1 MILLION fake followers on Instagram. The account is still alive and well. I've been meaning to write a blog post regarding this endeavor. But moreso, I've come to the conclusion that social media needs to have verifiable audits for their userbase; similar to how there are audits done for financials. A lot of the value of these companies IS derived from their DAU/MAU and or userbase in general (example: WhatsApp - $19 billion for their 1 billion users).
- seydor 4y ago
  Revenue != Value
  - gzer0 4y ago
    I intended to imply that daily/monthly active users ARE the value for many businesses. Facebook valued WhatsApp's 1 billion DAU/MAU at $19 billion despite the fact that WhatsApp was not producing any cashflow.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  How much did that cost? And were you able to get any value from the fake followers?
  - gzer0 4y ago
    I did this solely to collect data for a personal project I am doing. My last post (on Instagram) had 10 views, so from that standpoint, I gained nothing, however, I did learn lots of valuable insight into the realm of fake followers for which I will make a blog entry detailing my findings soon.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  I've bought a small amount of twitter followers ($10-$20) for a meme account once. They disappeared over the course of a month or two. Checking online that's what happens with the majority of services.
natch 4y ago
That .42 has got to be a small wink at Elon… if not from the team that did this, then from the simulation.
mabbo 4y ago
To be clear: it doesn't matter, as far as Elon Musk and his buyout is concerned. To quote Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter: > “Temporarily on hold” is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter. > That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out that “spam/fake accounts” represent more than 5% of Twitter users... The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong ... but only if the inaccuracy would have a “Material Adverse Effect” on the company. That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware courts have almost never found an MAE. > Musk ... had the opportunity to do due diligence on these numbers before signing the deal. (He declined.) He can’t now go to Twitter and say “actually now you need to prove that your user numbers are right.” [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
- badwolf 4y ago
  I think Musk declining due diligence is a pretty important point that needs to be repeated often the last few days...
Strs2FillMyDrms 4y ago
I see people are forgetting the only reason we care about this number is because someone was not confortable with what bots and non bots were saying. If they are bots or not is just a convenience because of the price. I dont have the money to care, yet I was well aware about it... Musk should sample his followers that would drive the price even lower.
- throwbigdata 4y ago
  Some people care because it goes to the heart of the advertising costs and value.
  - Strs2FillMyDrms 4y ago
    I know. And Ive been waiting ever since Facebooks IPO when are people going to relize the tech for target marketing is more effective than what it seems. The reason why it seems not as effective (at lower price brakets) is because the entire industry is based on fake numbers. This fake degree of effectivity allow them to balloon the prices, 1st By alleging that the ad is "as effective as what you are willing to pay" 2nd. Their "massive" userbases. In reality lower priced ads are not effective precisely because their userbase is not as massive. as such what should be defined as normal tier is now the highest priced type of advertisement campaign. The people hardly dig into this as there is no real incentive, billion dollar companies are not being sold all the time. The % of bots was known to be between 15 and 20 before he made the deal. If your plan is to buy a soda company to sell soda I would not believe a good strat is to reveal how cheap the product is, in reality, you are basically cornering yourself. If he manages to buy it,the issue will immediately dissapear. If he would genuinly made an effort to unmask the industry to help the consumer, I would be behind that.
pcmoney 4y ago
Bots contribute easily a third of the value of the Twitter service, they aren’t “fake”. This is a terrible analysis.
newobj 4y ago
Remember when Twitter first started, people thought Twitter usernames were going to be like domain names (except free)? LOL. I must have 50 Twitter accounts personally. Any time I had an idea, I used to grab a Twitter account for it. Anyway I think it’s pretty goofy to try to make claims around %s of Twitter accounts, active or otherwise, only absolute numbers make sense. What really matters at this point besides revenue and revenue trend?
oxff 4y ago
Elon nuking the "ad industry" would be amazing.
nrmitchi 4y ago
The biggest issue with any "study" like this is the definitions. What is a "bot"? What counts as "inactive"? What about "bots" that aren't "bad bots"? For example, a news organization twitter account that automatically tweets out new articles. This is clearly a "bot", but is it a "fake account"? Yes, most studies published specify what their own interpretation of these are, those definitions tend to be wildly inconsistent, and make any sort of comparison of the rest of the methodology impossible.
rvz 4y ago
Not surprising. On the flip-side, you do realise this is a way to justify complete verification of users on the platform to significantly reduce the bots, fake accounts, etc? I won't be surprised to see that implemented soon. Probably by the end of this month, things are going to get very chaotic at Twitter. We'll see what happens.
Traster 4y ago
So to get this straight - SparkToro have decided to burn their reputation down chasing a spurious irrelevant claim from someone else's merger. It'll never cease to amaze me how many people will take obvious trolling and treat is as reasonable. This is like conducting a serious analysis into whether the US election was stolen. I hope they like law suits: > Our analysis found that 19.42%, nearly four times Twitter’s Q4 2021 estimate, fit a conservative definition of fake or spam accounts Ok great, I hope you have fun proving that in court. Especially the part where you have to prove that Twitter's definitions which you don't know match yours. >SparkToro is a tiny team of just three Then I applaud your bold decision to interfere with a $45Bn merger. >Our definition (which may differ from Twitter’s own Any lawyers in the house? How obviously do you have to renege on your libelous claims before you're in the clear?
fattybob 4y ago
I am also an avid twitter reader, but seldom post, I would assume valid counts of users would recognize users who at least access and refresh their feeds
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Only 19.42%? That's gotta be way low
mr_gibbins 4y ago
One slightly problematic aspect of their methodology is that 'Casey ... [found] 8,555 to have an overlap of features highly correlated with fake/spam accounts'. Which features were they? How reliable are those features? What method was used to overlap the features? What thresholds within that method were used to classify the overlap(s) as spam, or not spam? Unfortunately this research, while compelling, fails the falsifiability test.
timcavel 4y ago
j4pe 4y ago
Parag apparently lost his patience with superficial and misleading claims about Twitter spam (like this analysis) and posted about it today. You can see it here (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576). Noteworthy highlights: * Twitter estimates its <5% number from human analysis of multi-thousand user random samplings of mDAU * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences * Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis * Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data Having just finished building a Twitter analysis tool, I agree with Parag that the Twitter API doesn't provide sufficient clarity to make decisions about spam. This article's analysis doesn't hold up - just because you can name several features you're going to use to generate a spam confidence score about an account does not mean that spam confidence score will have any precision.
- seydor 4y ago
  It makes sense. The bots are just loud and tend to all follow the most famous people, so their numbers look larger when people look there
- modeless 4y ago
  "But you don't know which ones we count as mDAUs" and "accounts that look like spam are actually real" are not as good a defense as he thinks. The product is still affected by spam and fraud even if it's excluded from advertising metrics, and accounts that look like spam are not good for the product either even if they happen to be real people for whatever reason.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  I think Elon's response reflects what a lot of us are thinking about the "<5%" number.
- dang 4y ago
  Related thread: Twitter CEO: “Let’s talk about spam, with the benefit of data, context” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 - May 2022 (13 comments)
mym1990 4y ago
Is there any kind of baseline for what percentage of a system can be fake/spam to still be considered a "healthy" system?
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Nearly 85% of all emails are spam. I would pay $44bn to own email.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
The methodology is not perfect but I think it raises a serious concern. I'm curious what other methodologies for identifying fake/spam accounts might be used. What about likes and retweets? Perhaps Mr. Musks' team did an analysis of their own and saw a high number of potential fakes/bots, and that made them question the authenticity of Twitter's numbers. If it can be shown with some accuracy that Twitter underreported the number of fake/spam accounts, how does this effect Musk's acquisition? Could he lower the price by saying you gave me incorrect data?
Melatonic 4y ago
Honestly I would guess higher than 20%
miguelazo 4y ago
Who is this actually a surprise to??? And how is it unique to Twitter? Yawn This whole Musk “deal” was just another way for him to get attention and attack the company. Sad that our media ecosystem is so thoroughly debased that it worked so well.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
spoonjim 4y ago
Note that these researchers define an “active” user as one who has posted a Tweet in the last two months. This is a very different definition than the standard “MAU” definition of “active” which means having used the site at all in the last period. One definition isn’t better than the other but it is worth noting that opening Twitter, looking at a lot of Tweets, seeing a lot of ads, and not posting any Tweets is a behavioral pattern much more commonly seen in humans than in spambots.
smm11 4y ago
I've had a Twitter account for 7 years, and have not once Tweeted.
riffic 4y ago
Fake is kind of a weird way to describe valid combinations of usernames and passwords that can log into Twitter.com. I would assume that if your account hasn't been disabled for whatever reason, it's a real Twitter account. Twitter, however, does call these accounts "fake" and has further rules/policies concerning Misleading & Deceptive Identities. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-impersonation-and-deceptive-identities-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-imper...
andreyk 4y ago
Cool effort! Does seem like a lot of thinking went into this. But, a few points: "Through trial and error (and, of course, pattern-fitting) we crafted a scoring system that could correctly identify over 65% of the spam accounts." 65% is not actually very accurate for a binary classifier... "Applying this model to the ~44K random, recently-active accounts provided Followerwonk produces a quality score for each account, visualized below:" Many real twitter uses are likely not to be "active" aside from reading stuff. So this methodology would clearly overestimate the number of spam/fake accounts (which all would be active). Also, this is an important point: "The other potential critique is our spam/fake follower calculation methodology. Because we crafted it in 2018, based off sample sets of purchased spam accounts, it’s likely that more sophisticated spammers and fake accounts go unidentified by our system" The features collected are certainly outdated by now.
lifefeed 4y ago
I want the inverse of this tool to audit it. I'll give it a specific account, and it identifies it as fake or not. Let me run some spot checks and accounts I know (and myself), and I'll find out if I can trust their numbers.
lvl102 4y ago
The operative word here is “active” for the lawyers to get away with false stats.
therealbilly 4y ago
In a perfect social media world, there wouldn't be fake accounts. It seems to me by allowing fake accounts you introduce noise and confusion into the system.
steve76 4y ago
politician 4y ago
If you were opposed to Twitter being sold to Elon Musk, then it seems like you would have a great incentive to create as many spam or fake accounts as possible over the next 30 days or so to shift the numbers in favor of him abandoning his takeover bid.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
I talk to bots a lot and you know what? If they are of good faith, and say interesting things that nobody else says, let them be. So in past eras women were excluded from speech and men would accuse each other of being a woman, women had to pretend to be men to get respect. Still do on forums like this. At some point bots will have enough humanity and intelligence breathed into them to deserve some dignity. Like books, books deserve respect, you can't just burn them or step on the pages, Bibles and Torahs in particular. That was a huge thing in the Holocaust, protecting many Torah from destruction, in one case I read Jews protected them by burying them.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Well I have literally never posted from twitter in my 5 years or so of having an account, but I'm on there almost everyday and use it as my news feed for topics I want to read about and blogs I follow. However according to them I'm fake/spam. hrrmph.
_ddzr 4y ago
It sounds like Twitter could easily shed hundreds of millions of fake followers by banning Elon Musk any account that follows Elon Musk!
systemvoltage 4y ago
Main thing missing in this thread is that Bots can do things that doesn't involve actively tweeting. Things like liking, following, etc. Even clicking a hashtag has some effect on the Twitter algorithm. Furthermore, the most important metric for Twitter advertisers is Impressions. You primarily pay with impressions on Twitter as an advertiser. Does Twitter show ads to bots/fake/spam accounts if they match the #hashtag criteria or target audience to pump up the impression numbers? Are these are the fake accounts that are lurking around without posting a tweet, but impacting the mDAU? "Active" definition needs to be more precise than simply tweeting. If I were an investor or an advertiser, I would drill into these details.
8note 4y ago
It's kinda sad that back in the day before the API was turned off, bits were some of the best twitter content. Bring back the bots, they were great
RobotsDownUnder 4y ago
If you take their percentage of 'active' fake/spam accounts as 20% and then apply a poster to lurker ratio of 25% you end up with roughly the twitter spam percentage where active does not just mean regularly posting. I would guess that this analysis is correctly identifying most spam accounts but that the majority of users don't post every 9 weeks but are still regularly checking their feed.

508 points by iamflimflam1 4y ago

Doesn't matter. People should actually read the Twitter filing. Could be closer to 50% and it wouldn't be enough for Musk to back out. Also, the word bot can have many definitions. A company using an app to schedule tweets could be considered a bot.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago

Elon already knew this of course. Buying Twitter was just an excuse to sell Tesla stock at a peak while avoiding suspicion. Now he’s teeing up his excuse to pull out. /conspiracy

Fargoan 4y ago
This is what I was thinking too. People would panic if he sold that much stock. But if he's just taking out a loan to buy another company it's no big deal.
MrMan 4y ago
Occams razor is not a conspiracy
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Billionaires making bold plays while backed by a cadre of top lawyers and accountants the kind of "conspiracy" that is totally expected.
- lapcat 4y ago
  I don't think this is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation is this: Musk's primary source of financing is Tesla stock. The sudden market downturn took a big chunk out of Tesla stock, which made his financial situation more difficult. The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position much easier. Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of the tech market. It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in valuation.
  - MrMan 4y ago
    I just find it hard to believe Musk really wants to own and run twitter, he seems to actively hate it and is trying to tank its value.
jacobsenscott 4y ago
/shrug Pump and dump is Elon's raison d'être. Idk why people keep falling for his bs.
- avs733 4y ago
  because he is rich - therefore smarter than everyone else.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  Elon pledges Tesla stock as collateral, Tesla stock goes down. Announces deal 'on hold', Tesla stock goes up. Unless he can get the price of Twitter down to where he does not have to use Tesla as collateral, its just a bad purchase decision.
sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
Or negotiate a better price?
closedloop129 4y ago
Or he actually wants to own Twitter and drives up its value by making Twitter known to every person on the internet. Bad news are good news. It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good investment.

efsavage 4y ago

64.56432% of significant digits are misused.

ralusek 4y ago
Your mental random number generator, or the keys you're willing to type one handedly for a bit, represent only 50% of the 10 Arabic numerals in use today.
- yboris 4y ago
  With only 7 digits typed, we would expect at least some repetition ;) The chance of no digit repeating out of 7 would be about 20%
- dylan604 4y ago
  With a proper keyboard including a 10-key, I can reach all 10 of those Arabic numerals with one hand. I find your logic equally as flawed as the statistic. You sir, must be a spambot account!

hamiltonians 4y ago

not a surprise at all.

seydor 4y ago

Nice try Elon, afaik twitter did disclose that they might be undercounting spam at 5% it s very hard to say anything about bots without IP addresses. The most active bots get sold / change subject etc.

wnevets 4y ago

and so it begins

gone35 4y ago

"70.23% of @ElonMusk followers are unlikely to be authentic, active users who see his tweets." Somewhat alarming, if accurate.

ramblerman 4y ago
They define active as having tweeted in the last 90 days. I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or their assumptions are a bit off. Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article): 1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently 2) Accounts with low number of tweets 3) Accounts with a low number of followers 4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority of twitter users don't tweet very much. 25% of Twitter Users Produce 97% of All Tweets: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  I am the same, in fact my account has never posted a thing ever, never liked at thing ever, I just follow people I want to see updates from that is all. I treat it like RSS not Social Media
  - phpisatrash 4y ago
    Look my username
- jacquesm 4y ago
  With Twitters' changes to ask people to log in to see most content the number of lurkers probably shot up.
- loceng 4y ago
  I'm now wondering what % of overall tweets are from that 1/5th of bots. If it's 1-1 then 20% of tweets being from bots isn't great - but it could even be more than that.

Jyaif 4y ago

Assuming that's true, would that mean that Elon has a way out that does not involve paying 1B$ ?

MrMan 4y ago
No
matdehaast 4y ago
AFAIK he doesn't even have a way out of paying the full buying price. The breakup fee does not allow him to abritarly invoke it. It is only conditional on finance, of which the banks have already given binding commitments. Matt Levine has a great article on it [1]. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
rossdavidh 4y ago
Analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk TL;DR is that it may or may not be enough to justify it in court if Twitter sues, but it probably is enough to make a court case necessary, and Twitter's board may be reluctant to spend years in court trying to win their case, since inevitably the court case would involve the very public airing of facts like this that would not paint Twitter in a good light.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  Aside: Patrick Boyle's humor is always spot on. Love that channel.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Absolutely agreed.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  And would block any possible future deal, with Elon or anybody else until that court case was resolved.

MrMan 4y ago

Musk should have hired these people before he waived due diligence

BitwiseFool 4y ago
I'm loathe to invoke "4D Chess" but I can't help but think this may have been a tactical decision to either lower the price of Twitter before the purchase, or to impugn its reputation without actually buying the company.
- rglover 4y ago
  My speculation: it was to make sure the data was pure when he uses it to train the Tesla Bot AI.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  To lower the price that he set after choosing to not run his due diligence? It’s possible, sure, but not likely.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Could be a tool for renegotiation, but then again I know very little about these kind of high stakes corporate acquisitions.

imchillyb 4y ago

This is /exactly/ why Mr. Musk has required the board to prove their math. The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares, is predicated upon human users on their system and not spam accounts. Twitter's valuation of its stock is way-overblown if there are 20% bot accounts on their platform. Go Elon!

colinmhayes 4y ago
Elon hasn’t required the board to do anything. He signed an agreement to purchase the company with no due diligence or backout clauses. If he tries to get out now he’ll see Twitter in court.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  If they lied on SEC filings about this, he bought something not as advertised, so I'm not so sure...
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Have you even read the SEC filings cause if you had you probably wouldn't be parroting that?
    - lmeyerov 4y ago
      I thought the SEC filings both have a number and a risk of being wrong? Re:parroting, while that seems to have been a pejorative, I wasn't actually copying from anywhere, just a smb executive sensitive to this sort of thing during m&a as standard business discussions, so it's interesting that it's being repeated enough to accuse people here of 'parrot'ing!
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        There is no hard number. It mentions that they are just an estimate and could be off. They are labeled as MAUs, so that gives a lot of leniency depending on how "active" they are. It doesn't define bots either. The SEC filings thing has been repeated even by Musk himself. It doesn't really help him.

rossdavidh 4y ago

"Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others..." If the figures for Elon Musk and Donald Trump's followers are at all accurate, it's over 50% for large accounts. Which means that the people who probably care most about whether or not their followers are real (e.g. those who might be charged for the privilege of using Twitter to communicate with large numbers easily), are the ones most likely to have mostly bots. I could see why this might impact the value of Twitter as a company.

Proven 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xwowsersx 4y ago

I am guessing that it makes sense that very high profile people will have a higher percentage of fake followers than an ordinary, small account would because many of these fake accounts are bots that are set up in order to get attention for whatever they're selling or promoting by interacting with high profile accounts.

michaelt 4y ago
Well, there are different bots for different purposes. A bot operated to post advert messages might want to post them on high profile accounts. A bot for a "500 followers for $5" company might be more likely to follow low-profile accounts, with some random activity/follows thrown in as camouflage. A bot operated to amplify certain messages/opinions might follow accounts of middling visibility, and focus on likes rather than more visible activity.
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  Good points

gentleman11 4y ago

I signed up with a vpn and got banned for life after a single nonsense tweet about not liking the feed and following 4-5 famous people. I don’t think bot detection techniques are very robust > This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t). In other words, their model performs well on their training set, and they don’t acknowledge that it may be over fitted or mislabeled, and they hand wave mistakes

fivre 4y ago
they're robust at generating false positives! i got insta-locked for, i think, signing up using my own email domain, to make an account that shares pictures i took of geese. it took about 4 months to wait for them to unlock it meanwhile, saudi bot armies apparently basically run rampant across the platform
DerekBickerton 4y ago
I'm 6 months into my account and they still haven't asked for a phone number. I mean, I have one ready if they ask for it. Maybe I've been whitelisted as a non-bad-faith actor due to my timezone and other factors.
joering2 4y ago
Its get even worse than that. I have a test account with about 10,000 followers (mostly real people, you can tell), created via home-used IP, and few days after Musk tweet comparing Gates to Emoji of pregnant man, I did exact same tweet! With exact same punctuation, images, icons, everything. Less than 2 days later I am banned for "spewing hatred based on sex, gender or religion". No amount of replies that my tweet was same as another but much much more popular account helped. Banned for life.

mherdeg 4y ago

Interesting to think about: > Our systems do not, however, attempt to identify Twitter accounts that may be irregularly operated by a human but have some automated behaviors (e.g. a company account with multiple users, like our own @SparkToro, or a community account run by a single person, like Aleyda Solis’ @CrawlingMondays). We cannot know how Twitter (or Mr. Musk) might choose to classify these accounts, but we bias to a relatively conservative interpretation of “Spam/Fake.” So this means: * @EmojiAquarium - spam/fake * @threateningcake - not spam/fake * @CanYouPetTheDog - spam/fake * @ChuckGrassley - not spam/fake (?? - what fraction are staff generated vs Chuck?) * @Wendys - spam/fake * @Twitter - spam/fake

durnygbur 4y ago

So politicians and rich are announcing new laws and their stuff mostly to bots while a casual visitor sees a login wall. Nice. Throw it to a volcano with IG, FB and remaining American "internet" 1/8

morsch 4y ago

"We undercount active users whose accounts are protected, accounts that view tweets but don’t send any, and accounts that log in and engage in other ways beyond tweeting (like favoriting or adding profiles to lists)." My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio between lurkers and active posters. Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and, these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother customizing their profile.

avs733 4y ago
so much of this thread is 'proof' that supports whatever elon musk is trying to do, but seems to not realize this is a totally independent actor making a dubious set of assumptions to come to a number. This analysis might be interesting because it is timely but it has no bearing on the musk twitter acquisition anymore than me running such an analysis does.
hotpotamus 4y ago
Yeah, I never knew I was a bot. I thought I just had a passing interest in a few people on Twitter and not much of interest to share of my own.
- kurthr 4y ago
  Yep, me too.
- dylan604 4y ago
  That's because you took the blue pill.
- tinsmith 4y ago
  I remember when I found out I was a bot. It was during a harrowing judgement conflict with an image-based captcha about traffic lights, and caused a complete shutdown of my higher order processes. To this day, I still don't know the threshold of how much traffic light actually needs to be in a square to be considered for selection, so I just stopped logging in to everything.

waynecochran 4y ago

Says a user named "Followerwonk" ... to be fair, they do profer a method for reproducing their results. I am guessing that there are some bots they are missing ... ones that are close to passing the Turing Test.

lapcat 4y ago

My personal impression from using Twitter for years is that the actual number may be twice as high, more like 40% than 20%. The researchers repeatedly say that they were very conservative in their estimates and only counted accounts that were extremely likely to be spam. "This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t)." PROTIP: You can search Twitter by URL. Just search for a popular news article on Twitter, and you can see the massive number of obviously non-human accounts who are tweeting the article.

542458 4y ago

I don't think this post means as much as people are acting like it does. The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality. Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I think I match all of them and I too am a trustworthy human, fellow human.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Exactly what a bot would say.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    hah ha, fellow human, how we love to jape!
brandall10 4y ago
I match these as well, though I'm not an active user.
jeffbee 4y ago
Seriously. Having a URL in your bio is suspicious IMHO.

g-clef 4y ago

Oh, do I have notes on their methodology. 1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive. This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their results. 2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as monetizable as high-volume posters.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always vastly outnumber people who post content on any platform. If lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5% and twitter’s “<5%” figure is accurate.
- hadlock 4y ago
  Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority, creates a sort of echo chamber. I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 4y ago
And yet I find 20% more believable then under 5% Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.

jeffbee 4y ago

Why would a uniform sample of Twitter accounts be even remotely interesting? My Twitter experience consists of people I personally know. None of them are bots. If you took a random sample of websites you'd find that 99.995% of them are spam. That's why we have to rank search results.

severino 4y ago

So ~20% of Twitter accounts are fake; however, the last time I tried to create a Twitter account for legitimate purposes (asking some customer questions) I couldn't, just because I didn't want Twitter to have my phone number.

alaricus 4y ago
I don't have a Twitter account exactly for this reason. No Twitter, you are not getting my phone number.

alaricus 4y ago

tiffanyh 4y ago

How does Elon benefit by NOT acquiring Twitter?

coldcode 4y ago

I check everyone I follow (mostly artists) to see if they are posting art generally, and look at most of the people who follow me to see what they do before following them back. There are a few (legit) retweeting bots and I have ignored a bunch of people because they did not seem real. I remember a set of accounts followed me that had (1) no tweets (2) avatar pic of MCU movie actor and (3) hundreds of followers.

fullstackchris 4y ago

Why are we always "surprised" by this?

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance. Their activities range from peddling propaganda and disinformation to those attempting to sell products, induce website clicks, push phishing attempts or malware, manipulate stocks or cryptocurrencies, and (perhaps worst) harass or intimidate users of the platform." My perception of Twitter is that some of the worst behavior on Twitter is coming from the 'well-respected authentic accounts of government and media personalities', particularly when it comes to disinformation, marketing, and indeed, intimidation of those with non-conformant opinions on various topics, such as, for example, the wisdom of unconditionally flooding Ukraine with high-tech ordnance in the name of repelling the Russian invasion (or is that really more about delivering a cash cow to US weapons manufacturers)? That's the kind of thing that could lead to doxing by corporate media reporters and charges of being 'a Russian asset' even if such concerns are reasonable. Also, how many of the 'registered authentic accounts' include tweets not written by the actual personality they claim to represent, but rather by some kind of in-house PR/image management consultants? Just because there's a paid human somewhere in the chain doesn't mean the account is all that 'authentic'.

schleck8 4y ago

Go through this comment section, you won't believe it https://mobile.twitter.com/McDonalds/status/1521143128073424897 https://mobile.twitter.com/McDonalds/status/1521143128073424...

mk89 4y ago

The question would be ... how much will Elon Musk pay to buy Twitter after pointing out that their business is essentially a bunch of bots, etc.? Kind of "hey guys, look, I really think your platform costs around 52$ per share, but ... let's try to see the actual price. How many bots do you have again? :)" Whenever this guy speaks, a whole freaking market moves. It's like "cleaning up the mess" even before joining the company as their CEO. In the worst case scenario, he dodged a huge bullet. So, who cares.

sschueller 4y ago

What kind of idiot would attempt a purchase of such magnitude before doing his due diligence (obviously, no one, it's an excuse after the price collapsed)? For fs some people probe fruit for a minute until they decide it's worthy a purchase. How many more of these types of "events" until people stop treating Elon like some super genius god? Stop giving/loaning him money enabling this garbage.

FargaColora 4y ago
Did you read the article, or even these comments on the article? Nothing supports what you say at all. Of course it's easier just to shout about the billionaire man.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Did you read the HN guidelines? If not then I would invite you to do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Which guideline is the OP's comment breaking?
    - kazinator 4y ago
      This one: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
      - systemvoltage 4y ago
        Spot on!
deelowe 4y ago
This seems intentional to me. Musk has been claiming there's a bot/troll problem on social media for quite some time. I think he knew this going in.

mattzito 4y ago

This study is a great example of how you can use the data you have available to talk yourself into your conclusions. The implicit point of the study is to refute the "5% of Twitter accounts are spam" stat from Twitter's 10-Q that was the basis of his putting the twitter acquisition "on hold". Except - the baseline that they choose is entirely NOT comparable to that of Twitter's baseline. The study says: > Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU). Except that we know what Twitter defines as a monetizable DAU: > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. Nothing about posting, nothing about engagement at all - simply: were you able to see an ad? So there isn't any reason to claim that this "might" represent what Twitter uses as an mDAU - we know, in fact, that is not how they measure it. A more honest statement would have been: "We selected a random sample of (etc. etc.). We believe that this sample is large enough to be significantly significant, however, it can not be compared to Twitter's mDAU set, as it does not count passive consumers of Twitter content. Instead, this data can be used to suggest that a significant amount of the total posted content on Twitter is delivered by bots" My guess is the number of consumers of content is greater than the posters of content by several orders of magnitude, though some of that would be mitigated by the longer time horizon.

gitfan86 4y ago
The whole thing is BS. Twitter could have easily got an accurate number if they wanted to. And Elon could have forced them to do that as part of the deal or done a decent job on his own before the offer. Both sides are bullshitting to negotiate a better price.
- mattzito 4y ago
  The only one bullshitting is Elon Musk - that 5% number has been in Twitter's 10-Q for literally years. Here's the 10-Q from Q3 2020: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/cb1d93d5-13d2-4d03-96b4-c90efe5ac5fc.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/cb1d93d... "We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the third quarter of 2020 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter" This is not a new stat or new information.

tmaly 4y ago

That is a 0.03% sample size of the total 130+ million accounts. I was just explaining the law of small numbers to my daughter for her science fair. I think this would qualify.

bigbillheck 4y ago
Maybe someday she'll explain to you that errors in sample estimates depend only on sample size and not population size.
- tmaly 4y ago
  I think the bigger error is still in drawing conclusions from a small sample size.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    You're going to have decently sized error bars from a n=100 sample but it doesn't matter if it was 10% of a population of 1000 or 0.001% of a population of 10000000, the quality of the estimate is just as good.

formerly_proven 4y ago

Four significant digits? That's a lot of confidence.

ladyattis 4y ago

It's funny since I've had folks claim I must be a bot because I follow more folks than I have following me. It's just weird how these folks create metrics without much of a decent explanation. The fact of the matter is that bots are a problem that I think can only really be managed but not eliminated. The first thing is to make it botting not something that should be punished from the start but something that is used for common automated purposes just like how Twitter does it now with some bots being tagged as such for legitimate reasons but not blocked or shadowbanned.

alaricus 4y ago
I've been told that I'm a bot because I express views that deviate from the accepted consensus.

jacobrussell 4y ago

I think I've missed something here. Why would Elon not want to buy twitter if it has >5% spam accounts? Isn't the number of fake accounts one of the reasons he wanted to buy it in the first place? I don't understand why this would make him want to back out. It doesn't seem to be in conflict with any of the reasons he wants to buy.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 4y ago
You are reading his reasoning on face value. It is suggested that the reason is a ruse to back away from the original deal in that he either wants to renegotiate the price or walk away completely.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  Given how all other tech stocks are fareing right now, he definitely wants to renegotiate. It will be interesting to see what the boards does. Right now Musk is the only thing holding up their stock price. And if they hold him to paying the billion, he's just going to carp from the sidelines. Maybe they should let him out of deal, but close his account?
  - Traster 4y ago
    The problem for the twitter board was that no one else was interested at the valuation. The problem for Musk is that if he walks away first he has to pay $1bn - which he doesn't want to do, and second that if he comes back the board can find someone else to buy it, or just say no to him on the basis that he's not acting in good faith.
alaricus 4y ago
He has to pay 1 billion to Twitter if he backs down from the deal. This could be a way to get out of paying that.

andsome 4y ago

It seems the stated number is inflated by the hand of Elite's to increase the probability of the 'heard' moving back to Twitter.. over-looking Truth Social.. and crashing the one best chance of global free-speech rights surviving in an ever growing communist bound society.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

"I used to not be into bitcoin, until I met the right trader!" ...

LargeWu 4y ago

I think it's instructive to note the difference between 'fake' accounts and 'spam'/'bot' accounts. 'Fake' accounts exist to fraudulently increase follower count. This is what the study is claiming to measure. These typically have low activity and engagement profiles. 'Spam' or 'bot' accounts, on the other hand, generally have high activity. Whether trying to influence political opinions, or engaging in astroturfing or phishing activities. They probably have very, very high ratios of replies to original tweets, and overall tweets to # followers.

redmen 4y ago

20%? That's it?

phendrenad2 4y ago

Does this take into account deleted or banned accounts? Maybe that's not significant, but maybe it is.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago

Seems like both parties will see each other in court. Which is home field advantage for Musk really, considering what he got away with in the past.

oversocialized 4y ago

da39a3ee 4y ago

I'm sorry to be one of those people, but the low-contrast grey color used for the text is really annoying and makes me feel like I'm straining my eyes to read it! Why the fuck do designers encourage this? It is more readable as black, and I have a vague non-medically-informed sense that it might be better for people.

_joel 4y ago

I thought it'd be higher than that tbf

LNSY 4y ago

This estimate seems very low

mgas 4y ago

You only need to see who the author of this post is to know that the methodology is crap, the numbers are likely made up (19.42% is WAY too specific), and the post is just a grab for media attention on the coattails of some other internet meme garbage. This guy (Rand Fishkin) has been selling SEO as a religion for the better part of this century, and is in no small part responsible for all the search-result-garbage style websites everyone is complaining about elsewhere on HN today and every other day. He's a third-rate market-bro hack that's been taking advantage of web professionals who get thrown into SEO/Marketing jobs and have no idea what they're doing by relentlessly shoving half-assed corporate strategies through moz.com and now his new sparktoro.com, and calling himself the great SEO redeemer. Wanna question his methodology? There is none. Wanna question his science? Totally devoid.

seydor 4y ago
well if his science is SEO he seems to be good at it
mike_hearn 4y ago
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is absolutely standard when third parties discuss Twitter spam. There is an astounding amount of academic research doing the same thing with methodologies just as silly. https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
nonethewiser 4y ago
19.42 is a number rounded to 2dp. They rounded to "nearly 20" for the headline. I'm not sure how they could express things differently in this regard.

blenderdt 4y ago

The real question is: does it matter?

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I ran a small social network. These are active accounts. But active accounts usually are a small percentage of total accounts, especially when it comes to bot networks, because bot spammers usually create huge quantities of accounts in advance, so that as soon as one bot goes down, another spins up to take its place. I'd be surprised if 80% of the total accounts on twitter aren't bots.

justinpombrio 4y ago

If all you want to know is what fraction of all twitter accounts are spam accounts, it should be really easy: 1. Select 1000 accounts uniformly at random. Either from among all twitter accounts, or from active twitter accounts for whatever definition of "active". 2. Classify these 1000 by hand. Do as much investigation into them as you need to classify them accurately; no need to use heuristics here. You will (with very high probability) get an estimate accurate to within a percent or so. If you do statistics you could find the actual bounds.

alaricus 4y ago
How do you get 1000 acounts at random? Does twitter have an API for it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ianbooker 4y ago
  The stream API can sample, but then you see currently active accounts only. Users are denoted by numerical ID, you can sample using this.

bwagy 4y ago

Twitter isn't claiming of all its accounts less than 5% are bots. It is claiming less than 5% of their mDAU are. Without exposure to their methodology we are just speculating. It is entirely feasible that at any point in time 20% of accounts are bots. It is whether they have counted them in their mDAU that matters.

Phil_Latio 4y ago

I signed up at Twitter 9 years ago and use it every day, but have less than 50 tweets. Either you want to engage in discussion (to a varying degree) or you simply don't. But the latter doesn't necessarily mean you don't observe the discussion. Of course an active Twitter account can be one that never tweeted in 10 years. Such an account may as well see advertisements etc... So I think any outside studies are fundamentally flawed since they don't have access to internal data like last login time.

TheBlight 4y ago

Sounds low.

gzer0 4y ago

This doesn't come as a surprise; I was able to buy 1 MILLION fake followers on Instagram. The account is still alive and well. I've been meaning to write a blog post regarding this endeavor. But moreso, I've come to the conclusion that social media needs to have verifiable audits for their userbase; similar to how there are audits done for financials. A lot of the value of these companies IS derived from their DAU/MAU and or userbase in general (example: WhatsApp - $19 billion for their 1 billion users).

seydor 4y ago
Revenue != Value
- gzer0 4y ago
  I intended to imply that daily/monthly active users ARE the value for many businesses. Facebook valued WhatsApp's 1 billion DAU/MAU at $19 billion despite the fact that WhatsApp was not producing any cashflow.
HWR_14 4y ago
How much did that cost? And were you able to get any value from the fake followers?
- gzer0 4y ago
  I did this solely to collect data for a personal project I am doing. My last post (on Instagram) had 10 views, so from that standpoint, I gained nothing, however, I did learn lots of valuable insight into the realm of fake followers for which I will make a blog entry detailing my findings soon.
Tenoke 4y ago
I've bought a small amount of twitter followers ($10-$20) for a meme account once. They disappeared over the course of a month or two. Checking online that's what happens with the majority of services.

natch 4y ago

That .42 has got to be a small wink at Elon… if not from the team that did this, then from the simulation.

mabbo 4y ago

To be clear: it doesn't matter, as far as Elon Musk and his buyout is concerned. To quote Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter: > “Temporarily on hold” is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter. > That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out that “spam/fake accounts” represent more than 5% of Twitter users... The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong ... but only if the inaccuracy would have a “Material Adverse Effect” on the company. That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware courts have almost never found an MAE. > Musk ... had the opportunity to do due diligence on these numbers before signing the deal. (He declined.) He can’t now go to Twitter and say “actually now you need to prove that your user numbers are right.” [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

badwolf 4y ago
I think Musk declining due diligence is a pretty important point that needs to be repeated often the last few days...

Strs2FillMyDrms 4y ago

I see people are forgetting the only reason we care about this number is because someone was not confortable with what bots and non bots were saying. If they are bots or not is just a convenience because of the price. I dont have the money to care, yet I was well aware about it... Musk should sample his followers that would drive the price even lower.

throwbigdata 4y ago
Some people care because it goes to the heart of the advertising costs and value.
- Strs2FillMyDrms 4y ago
  I know. And Ive been waiting ever since Facebooks IPO when are people going to relize the tech for target marketing is more effective than what it seems. The reason why it seems not as effective (at lower price brakets) is because the entire industry is based on fake numbers. This fake degree of effectivity allow them to balloon the prices, 1st By alleging that the ad is "as effective as what you are willing to pay" 2nd. Their "massive" userbases. In reality lower priced ads are not effective precisely because their userbase is not as massive. as such what should be defined as normal tier is now the highest priced type of advertisement campaign. The people hardly dig into this as there is no real incentive, billion dollar companies are not being sold all the time. The % of bots was known to be between 15 and 20 before he made the deal. If your plan is to buy a soda company to sell soda I would not believe a good strat is to reveal how cheap the product is, in reality, you are basically cornering yourself. If he manages to buy it,the issue will immediately dissapear. If he would genuinly made an effort to unmask the industry to help the consumer, I would be behind that.

pcmoney 4y ago

Bots contribute easily a third of the value of the Twitter service, they aren’t “fake”. This is a terrible analysis.

newobj 4y ago

Remember when Twitter first started, people thought Twitter usernames were going to be like domain names (except free)? LOL. I must have 50 Twitter accounts personally. Any time I had an idea, I used to grab a Twitter account for it. Anyway I think it’s pretty goofy to try to make claims around %s of Twitter accounts, active or otherwise, only absolute numbers make sense. What really matters at this point besides revenue and revenue trend?

oxff 4y ago

Elon nuking the "ad industry" would be amazing.

nrmitchi 4y ago

The biggest issue with any "study" like this is the definitions. What is a "bot"? What counts as "inactive"? What about "bots" that aren't "bad bots"? For example, a news organization twitter account that automatically tweets out new articles. This is clearly a "bot", but is it a "fake account"? Yes, most studies published specify what their own interpretation of these are, those definitions tend to be wildly inconsistent, and make any sort of comparison of the rest of the methodology impossible.

rvz 4y ago

Not surprising. On the flip-side, you do realise this is a way to justify complete verification of users on the platform to significantly reduce the bots, fake accounts, etc? I won't be surprised to see that implemented soon. Probably by the end of this month, things are going to get very chaotic at Twitter. We'll see what happens.

Traster 4y ago

So to get this straight - SparkToro have decided to burn their reputation down chasing a spurious irrelevant claim from someone else's merger. It'll never cease to amaze me how many people will take obvious trolling and treat is as reasonable. This is like conducting a serious analysis into whether the US election was stolen. I hope they like law suits: > Our analysis found that 19.42%, nearly four times Twitter’s Q4 2021 estimate, fit a conservative definition of fake or spam accounts Ok great, I hope you have fun proving that in court. Especially the part where you have to prove that Twitter's definitions which you don't know match yours. >SparkToro is a tiny team of just three Then I applaud your bold decision to interfere with a $45Bn merger. >Our definition (which may differ from Twitter’s own Any lawyers in the house? How obviously do you have to renege on your libelous claims before you're in the clear?

fattybob 4y ago

I am also an avid twitter reader, but seldom post, I would assume valid counts of users would recognize users who at least access and refresh their feeds

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Only 19.42%? That's gotta be way low

mr_gibbins 4y ago

One slightly problematic aspect of their methodology is that 'Casey ... [found] 8,555 to have an overlap of features highly correlated with fake/spam accounts'. Which features were they? How reliable are those features? What method was used to overlap the features? What thresholds within that method were used to classify the overlap(s) as spam, or not spam? Unfortunately this research, while compelling, fails the falsifiability test.

timcavel 4y ago

j4pe 4y ago

Parag apparently lost his patience with superficial and misleading claims about Twitter spam (like this analysis) and posted about it today. You can see it here (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576). Noteworthy highlights: * Twitter estimates its <5% number from human analysis of multi-thousand user random samplings of mDAU * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences * Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis * Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data Having just finished building a Twitter analysis tool, I agree with Parag that the Twitter API doesn't provide sufficient clarity to make decisions about spam. This article's analysis doesn't hold up - just because you can name several features you're going to use to generate a spam confidence score about an account does not mean that spam confidence score will have any precision.

seydor 4y ago
It makes sense. The bots are just loud and tend to all follow the most famous people, so their numbers look larger when people look there
modeless 4y ago
"But you don't know which ones we count as mDAUs" and "accounts that look like spam are actually real" are not as good a defense as he thinks. The product is still affected by spam and fraud even if it's excluded from advertising metrics, and accounts that look like spam are not good for the product either even if they happen to be real people for whatever reason.
bobsmooth 4y ago
I think Elon's response reflects what a lot of us are thinking about the "<5%" number.
dang 4y ago
Related thread: Twitter CEO: “Let’s talk about spam, with the benefit of data, context” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 - May 2022 (13 comments)

mym1990 4y ago

Is there any kind of baseline for what percentage of a system can be fake/spam to still be considered a "healthy" system?

shapefrog 4y ago
Nearly 85% of all emails are spam. I would pay $44bn to own email.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

The methodology is not perfect but I think it raises a serious concern. I'm curious what other methodologies for identifying fake/spam accounts might be used. What about likes and retweets? Perhaps Mr. Musks' team did an analysis of their own and saw a high number of potential fakes/bots, and that made them question the authenticity of Twitter's numbers. If it can be shown with some accuracy that Twitter underreported the number of fake/spam accounts, how does this effect Musk's acquisition? Could he lower the price by saying you gave me incorrect data?

Melatonic 4y ago

Honestly I would guess higher than 20%

miguelazo 4y ago

Who is this actually a surprise to??? And how is it unique to Twitter? Yawn This whole Musk “deal” was just another way for him to get attention and attack the company. Sad that our media ecosystem is so thoroughly debased that it worked so well.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

spoonjim 4y ago

Note that these researchers define an “active” user as one who has posted a Tweet in the last two months. This is a very different definition than the standard “MAU” definition of “active” which means having used the site at all in the last period. One definition isn’t better than the other but it is worth noting that opening Twitter, looking at a lot of Tweets, seeing a lot of ads, and not posting any Tweets is a behavioral pattern much more commonly seen in humans than in spambots.

smm11 4y ago

I've had a Twitter account for 7 years, and have not once Tweeted.

riffic 4y ago

Fake is kind of a weird way to describe valid combinations of usernames and passwords that can log into Twitter.com. I would assume that if your account hasn't been disabled for whatever reason, it's a real Twitter account. Twitter, however, does call these accounts "fake" and has further rules/policies concerning Misleading & Deceptive Identities. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-impersonation-and-deceptive-identities-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-imper...

andreyk 4y ago

Cool effort! Does seem like a lot of thinking went into this. But, a few points: "Through trial and error (and, of course, pattern-fitting) we crafted a scoring system that could correctly identify over 65% of the spam accounts." 65% is not actually very accurate for a binary classifier... "Applying this model to the ~44K random, recently-active accounts provided Followerwonk produces a quality score for each account, visualized below:" Many real twitter uses are likely not to be "active" aside from reading stuff. So this methodology would clearly overestimate the number of spam/fake accounts (which all would be active). Also, this is an important point: "The other potential critique is our spam/fake follower calculation methodology. Because we crafted it in 2018, based off sample sets of purchased spam accounts, it’s likely that more sophisticated spammers and fake accounts go unidentified by our system" The features collected are certainly outdated by now.

lifefeed 4y ago

I want the inverse of this tool to audit it. I'll give it a specific account, and it identifies it as fake or not. Let me run some spot checks and accounts I know (and myself), and I'll find out if I can trust their numbers.

lvl102 4y ago

The operative word here is “active” for the lawyers to get away with false stats.

therealbilly 4y ago

In a perfect social media world, there wouldn't be fake accounts. It seems to me by allowing fake accounts you introduce noise and confusion into the system.

steve76 4y ago

politician 4y ago

If you were opposed to Twitter being sold to Elon Musk, then it seems like you would have a great incentive to create as many spam or fake accounts as possible over the next 30 days or so to shift the numbers in favor of him abandoning his takeover bid.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

I talk to bots a lot and you know what? If they are of good faith, and say interesting things that nobody else says, let them be. So in past eras women were excluded from speech and men would accuse each other of being a woman, women had to pretend to be men to get respect. Still do on forums like this. At some point bots will have enough humanity and intelligence breathed into them to deserve some dignity. Like books, books deserve respect, you can't just burn them or step on the pages, Bibles and Torahs in particular. That was a huge thing in the Holocaust, protecting many Torah from destruction, in one case I read Jews protected them by burying them.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Well I have literally never posted from twitter in my 5 years or so of having an account, but I'm on there almost everyday and use it as my news feed for topics I want to read about and blogs I follow. However according to them I'm fake/spam. hrrmph.

_ddzr 4y ago

It sounds like Twitter could easily shed hundreds of millions of fake followers by banning Elon Musk any account that follows Elon Musk!

systemvoltage 4y ago

Main thing missing in this thread is that Bots can do things that doesn't involve actively tweeting. Things like liking, following, etc. Even clicking a hashtag has some effect on the Twitter algorithm. Furthermore, the most important metric for Twitter advertisers is Impressions. You primarily pay with impressions on Twitter as an advertiser. Does Twitter show ads to bots/fake/spam accounts if they match the #hashtag criteria or target audience to pump up the impression numbers? Are these are the fake accounts that are lurking around without posting a tweet, but impacting the mDAU? "Active" definition needs to be more precise than simply tweeting. If I were an investor or an advertiser, I would drill into these details.

8note 4y ago

It's kinda sad that back in the day before the API was turned off, bits were some of the best twitter content. Bring back the bots, they were great

RobotsDownUnder 4y ago

If you take their percentage of 'active' fake/spam accounts as 20% and then apply a poster to lurker ratio of 25% you end up with roughly the twitter spam percentage where active does not just mean regularly posting. I would guess that this analysis is correctly identifying most spam accounts but that the majority of users don't post every 9 weeks but are still regularly checking their feed.