Musk: “We are checking the percentage of fake accounts on Twitter… Temporarily put on hold”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on the 13th (local time) that it would temporarily put a hold on the Twitter acquisition.

Musk said on Twitter that he was “temporarily suspending the takeover deal while awaiting concrete evidence for the calculation that Twitter’s spam and fake accounts account for less than 5% of Twitter users.” In the tweet, he linked a Reuters article on the 2nd day with the headline, “Twitter estimates the rate of spam and fake accounts to be less than 5% of all user accounts.”

In its report, Twitter described the company’s revenue metric, ‘monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU)’, stating that spam and bogus accounts impacted its metrics. “Based on our internal sampling of all accounts, we estimate that the average spam and fake accounts in Q1 2022 was less than 5% of mDAU for that quarter,” Twitter said. “Because the estimate was made with considerable self-judgment, it may not accurately represent the actual number of spam and fake accounts, and the actual number may be higher than the estimate.”

Musk agreed to take over Twitter last month and promised to regulate spam bots.