Without Twitter providing more context and showing their work, the number can't be trusted, thus it isn't credible.
If you claim you have such a low number of bots (5%), you better prove it, otherwise I'll assume the worst and go with 20%.
Anyone that goes on Twitter knows it's above 5%. All 3rd party estimations are well above 5%. Prove it Twitter. Prove it.
Twitter has never made any such claim. It's incredible how hard it is for some people to actually read the extremely explicit process they lay out in their SEC filing.
Twitter has users. A subset of those users are "monetizable daily active users" - that is, users who log in to Twitter from platforms which are capable of showing them ads, or otherwise making money. A subset of users who would normally be counted as mDAUs may be discovered today to be spam bots, may be suspended for other reasons, or may otherwise turn out not to be monetizable - so they are excluded from future mDAUs. A subet of those users have been counted as mDAUs in the past: this is the subset that is estimated to be 5%.
There are plenty of bots on Twitter that are not mDAUs. Some are actually fully legitimate, like the earthquake or weather reporting bots: they are valid Twitter accounts who are bots and who are not counted as mDAUs.
Their methodology is pick 100 users from the mDAU every day, then have a human decide botornot.
If you wanted to show those numbers were wrong, you might ask to see those specific users and come up with your own botornot score. Or if you thought those weren't inaccurate, but maybe not a representative sample, you might ask for 10,000 users counted as mDAU on a specific day (or each day) and botornot them and see if that matches the 100 sample. If you didn't trust twitter's sampling, you could ask for the full list of users and sample it yourself before botornot.
But instead, it seems like they were trying to count botornot for the full population without considering if they were in mDAU or not, which makes it a flawed comparison. The counterclaim says mDAU isn't the appropriate measure for some of the alternate revenue plans Musk was considering, and that's probably true, but it's not relevant to twitter's current business and if their numbers were accurate to the degree they were measured.
> and even said their methodology could be wrong
Yeah that's my point, their supplied number is unusable for investors, advertisers, etc.
Combine that with the bot experiences on Twitter, the 3rd party estimates of 10-20% if looks way off.
I don't see why NOW anyone would trust 5%. Diligence has NOW been done and that "methodology could be wrong" looks likely.
-- EDIT (post limit) --
> But that's the whole point - Musk waived his right to do due diligence, so he is pointing at this statement being wrong (and not unusable) as his way out.
@suresk, that's not a thing, but it is a talking point, but I'm not debating that. I'm saying NOW that the diligence is done and we know it's probably not accurate. See my first post.
The 5% number claimed by Twitter is not the percentage of all accounts that are bots. That has never been the claim. Twitter separates its accounts into "mDAU"s and "other", and they are claiming 5% of the mDAUs are bots. You cannot falsify this claim with "bot experiences on Twitter", because all the bots you're seeing could be correctly classified as "other". Indeed, nobody outside Twitter can falsify this claim because it's a statement about Twitter's internal classification. The only thing that can falsify Twitter's claim is their own internal data, so that's why discovery is being done.
3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots, Twitter's is 5%.
Others were defending it by saying "well the number doesn't have to be accurate legally" or "well Musk should have known it's not really accurate".
My counter is that weasel legal wording and logic doesn't give much confidence in Twitter's number at all for FUTURE buyers, advertisers, investors, etc.
They should show their work and prove their number or investors / advertisers / buyers should lower their valuations to reflect somewhere in the middle.
But Twitter hasn't really ever been about the money so the status quo will stay the same.
- edit -
@blitzar: https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twit... you can see their methodology here.
Despite two different mDAU classifications, both of the datasets from SparkToro and Followerwonk were about 20% mDAU bots.
Could you provide some sources for these estimates? In particular, I'm curious about the methodology and data sources those third-party sources use.
Their methodology is very detailed. Maybe Twitter can post theirs to give more confidence in their 5%.
They used multiple datasets and posted the calculated mDAU for each.
The main problem is that they aren't performing an analysis of mDAUs, as you imply. Their datasets are:
1. Followerwonk Random Sample – "Marc wrote code to randomly select public accounts from Followerwonk’s active database, and passed them to SparkToro for analysis. Casey on our team further scrubbed this list and ran 44,058 public, active accounts through our Fake Followers spam analysis process"
2. Aggregated Average of the Fake Followers Tool - "Over the last 3.5 years of operation, SparkToro’s Fake Followers tool has been run on 501,532 unique accounts, and analyzed thousands of followers for each of those, totaling more than 1 billion profiles (though these are not necessarily unique, and we don’t keep track of which profiles were analyzed as part of that process). ... We’ve included it for comparison, and to show that an analysis that includes simply random Twitter accounts (vs. those that have been recently active) may not be as accurate."
3. All Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter
4. Active Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter
5. Random Sample of 100 Users Following the @Twitter account
The last three datasets are obviously not relevant for getting a good estimate of mDAU authenticity. The second dataset may include inactive/duplicate accounts, and it's not clear how random the account selection is. The first dataset (as well as the second, to some extent) suffers from only including public, active accounts, which very much is not the same population Twitter is working with:
> We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.
In particular, note that Twitter has no requirement that mDAUs have public activity.
In addition, the article contains this bit at the bottom, which further reinforces that these numbers aren't comparable:
> We are not disputing Twitter’s claim. There’s no way to know what criteria Twitter uses to identify a “monetizable daily active user” (mDAU) nor how they classify “fake/spam” accounts. We believe our methodology (detailed above) to be the best system available to public researchers. But, internally, Twitter likely has unknowable processes that we cannot replicate with only their public data.
And ... 3rd partys are differentiating a twitter account from a mDAU how? Hint: they are not.
Given all of that, they could have said the number was .01% or 90%, and neither would have been misrepresentation.
Now knowing it's surrounded by loose language because the number is so loose, assume the worst prediction, which is 15-20% from 3rd parties.
Musk agreed that the number of bots not currently being caught was probably higher than 5%, which was a big part of his stated reasons for buying Twitter. Then the market took a turn, and now up is down, Musk is pretending this number matters.
It doesn't.
I would love to see how Delaware Chancery Court treats this concept. So going in front of a judge is the best way to find out!
I routinely accept contracts and agreements with parts I know I'm going to ignore or violate just because I understand the jurisdiction. It's more efficient than negotiating and actually having lawyers making revisions for months at great cost.
I'm not familiar with this nuance of Delaware but its not outside of the realm of possibility that there is an argument that can help Elon.