The tussle between Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Elon Musk is out in public. Agrawal posted a long thread, saying that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform for the last four quarters were ‘well under 5%,’ responding to acquirer Elon Musk’s criticism of the company’s handling of phony accounts. Tesla’s boss responded to Agrawal’s tweet with a poop emoji! Yes, a poop emoji.
Parag Agarwal started the thread with, “Let’s talk about spam.” He said Twitter’s estimate, which has stayed the same since 2013, cannot be reproduced externally given the need to use both public and private information to check whether an account is spam. Also, he stated how millions of spam accounts are handled on a daily basis and how the team is continuously working on this process.
“First, let me state the obvious: 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 said.
“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,” Parag added.
Elon Musk, who recently said his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter was ‘temporarily on hold’ pending information on spam accounts, reacted to Agrawal’s defense of the company’s methodology with a poop emoticon.
Keeping with Agrawal’s tweets, the micro-blogging platform had revealed in a filing earlier this month that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of its monetisable daily active users (mDAUs) during the first quarter (Q1).