Parag Agrawal rebuts Elon Musk, lays out how Twitter fight spambots
Premium- ‘We are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong’, Twitter CEO tweeted
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Monday took to Twitter to explain how the social media company fights fake and spam accounts on the platform.
In a series of tweets, Agrawal began by stating the obvious which is that “spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong."
The Twitter CEO further shared that the social media company suspends “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)."
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, he tweeted.
Agrawal said the team updates its systems and rules “constantly" to help take down as much spam as possible, without accidentally suspending real people. Twitter has said false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the past quarter. Agrawal said that estimate is based on “multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUS."
The company’s human review process is based on its rules that define spam and platform manipulation, he said, using both public and private data, like IP address and geolocation, to make a determination on each account. “There are LOTS of details that are very important underneath this high-level description," he said in a tweet. “We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you."
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.
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There are LOTS of details that are very important underneath this high-level description. We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you, he added.