Actually Elon Musk, You Can Count Twitter Bots. Here's How To Do So
Elon Musk’s assertion last month that the number of Twitter bots is as “unknowable as the human soul” may well be a negotiating tactic from a man who’s probably feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse. Yet tallying up how many machines are running around on Twitter Inc.’s platform is a pretty straightforward process, if only everyone can agree on what they’re counting.
A “very significant matter” deterring Musk from closing the deal at the $44 billion price originally agreed is “whether the number of fake and spam users on the system is less than 5%, as Twitter claims, which I think is probably not most people's experience when using Twitter,” he told Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. Other items to be overcome include debt financing and a shareholder vote on the acquisition, he said.
With shares of the social media company trading at 30% below Musk’s purchase price of $54.20, there’s $15 billion worth of reasons for the South African businessman to find loopholes and push for a discount. His comment Tuesday is similar to one made in a June 6 filing, when he claimed that Twitter refused to provide the information needed “to facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts on the company’s platform.”
Let’s pause here. So far we have three different terms — bot, spam, and fake accounts — which could have entirely different meanings. Not all bots are fake, and not all fakes send spam.
There are numerous ways to categorize accounts on Twitter, but the simplest and most useful may be to examine every Twitter handle on two bases. Human, where an actual person sets up and runs activities on the account, or automated where a piece of human-written software acts on behalf of the
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