CEO Parag Agrawal deliberated on Twitter’s bot issue much to the chagrin of soon to be boss Elon Musk. Parag’s thirteen tweet thread on bots was met with ‘poop’ emoji by the Tesla boss when he remarked that it’s not possible to perform bot estimation externally.
Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Bots have been a major concern for virtually everyone on Twitter. While Elon has put the deal on hold tentatively following twitter’s own bot estimation. The bird app claims the presence of about 5% of bots on the platform. Parag tweeted that it is well below 5% for the last four quarters. However he reiterated that ‘we aren’t perfect in catching spam.’
The use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real. FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes we often see multiple indicators that it’s a real person.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Parag went on to explain the parameters and modus operandi of bot hunting on the app. However he reiterated that ‘we aren’t perfect in catching spam.’ Twitter keeps on updating its systems and rules constantly to keep the bots and spam in check. The idea is to simplify the process for the lay without riddling ‘em with captcha every time they try to log in. Yeah! That would be ridiculous.
The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Spam harms the experience of the real people, Parag remarked while explaining how ‘spam’ infiltrates Twitter. ‘Spam’ is not always binary ie. human/not human rather they could be the combination of human + automation making it more sophisticated. Fighting ‘em is dynamic and the usually a set of rules that catches spam today might not work tomorrow as spams and bots evolve constantly!
Next, spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So – they are sophisticated and hard to catch.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Parag went on to explain how hard it is to identify accounts that superficially look spam but are genuine and vice versa.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
While Elon has earlier rallied to decimate bots from the platform, last week he put the twitter deal tentatively on hold on account of bot count.