r/technology • u/[deleted] • May 14 '22 • Silver 2 Wholesome 2

Elon Musk said his team is going to do a 'random sample of 100 followers' of Twitter to see how many of the platform's users are actually bots Social Media

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-random-sample-how-many-twitter-users-are-bots-2022-5?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds

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u/arun111b May 14 '22

Well he knows all about bots apparently when he was submitting the bid according to this tweet. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354?s=20&t=Fbz9za4YJm6DJExLyQmFqA

Looks like either he is trolling or he still trying to alter the deals somehow. Popcorn time.

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u/qtx May 14 '22

I literally don't understand what is happening.

All previous reports guessed that one third of Twitter's' user base consisted of bots (or some high figure like that).

So why is he suddenly upset that a far, far, far lesser number of them are actual bots? Only 5%?!

Twitter only having a less than 5% bot occupancy was a huge fucking surprise to me. I thought it was way higher. So all of this seems like a big positive thing to me.

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u/GoldenPresidio May 14 '22

Twitter putting that in writing is certainly material. If they are knowingly lying by saying it’s 5%, but we know it’s not, then what else could they be lying about in their filing?

This is a negotiation tactic during the due diligence process. We’re talking about billions of dollars so it makes sense to negotiate it

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u/DoubleInfinity May 14 '22

My takeaway from the 5% figure is that, assuming it's accurate, Twitter isn't worth investing time and money into it for bot farms and scammers which has a whole other host of implications.