In a Twitter tete-a-tete that amused many on the social networking platform, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Monday, 16 May, made a "pile of poo" emoji in response to some insights on spam accounts posted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. This comes a month after Musk sealed a deal to buy the micro-blogging website.
In a long thread, Agrawal explained the process for detection of spam accounts: "Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account."
The Tesla owner made a "pile of poo" emoji in a comment on the CEO's Twitter thread.
Agrawal's elucidation, which stated that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform for the last four quarters were "well under 5%," comes after Musk's criticism of the platform's handling of fake accounts.
Musk has put the $44-billion Twitter deal temporarily on hold, as he seeks to know how many Twitter accounts are spam or fake before he invests in the company.
In response to Agrawal's explanation, Musk said, "Have you tried just calling them?"
"So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter," he said in a comment posted on Agrawal's tweets.
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).