Twitter To Supply Elon Musk With Bot Data – Report

Twitter is to provide Elon Musk with a stream of daily data made up of the 500 million tweets made on a daily basis.

The promise of a deluge of daily data comes after Elon Musk said this week that Twitter was failing to provide data on the number of bots and fake accounts, and it amounted to a “material breach”, meaning he could walk away from the $44bn acquisition.

This was not the threat Musk has made to walk away. Last month Musk temporarily placed the deal on hold over concerns he raised about Twitter’s estimate of the number of automated bots on the service.

Bot numbers

It stems from when Twitter in late April said that less than 5 percent of Twitter users are spam or fake accounts.

But Musk believes the true figure of fake or bot accounts is closer to 20 percent or more. Critics believe he is simply using this bot issue so as to renegotiate the deal below his $54.20 percent offer.

Meanwhile UK-based data analytics and consulting firm GlobalData entered the argument this week when its mathematical model estimated that around 10 percent of Twitter’s active accounts are posting spam content.

This is double that of Twitter’s reported figure – likely due to a difference in criteria as to what counts as ‘spam’.

Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal however has previously defended Twitter’s estimate of the number of automated bots on the service.

He said Twitter uses a combination of public and private data to identify bots and that accounts that appear fake may actually be operated by real people.

Data deluge

But with Musk threatening to walk away again from his acquisition, Twitter will provide the world’s richest man with access to a stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted every day, according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile the New York Times also reported that Twitter would let Musk view its “firehose” of daily traffic.

The agreement, if accurate, could make it harder for Elon Musk to walk away from the deal citing the lack of data.

But the access to the data may still might not satisfy Elon Musk, because of the sheer quantity of data that he will have to sift through.