Twitter claims to have solved problems with fake accounts.
Twitter officials have claimed that they are removing over a million spam accounts from their platform every day.
That’s double the number cited by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in a tweet in May, though the company stands by its longstanding position that bots make up less than 5 percent of Twitter’s active user base.
The number of spam accounts and how Twitter handles them has become a point of discussion in recent months, after Elon Musk threatened to back out of buying the company, citing concerns that the company was downplaying the problem.
Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on whether the latest metric represents an update to statistics from May or if something else was calculated. Twitter’s latest figure includes users who are not allowed to create accounts and, as such, are never counted as users.
Twitter and Musk reached an agreement to buy the company in April for $44 billion. However, in May, Musk tweeted that the deal was “pending,” suggesting that 20 percent or more of Twitter’s user base could be bots.
He asked the company to prove the 5 percent figure it reported was accurate and in June accused the company of withholding information, saying it “transparently refuses to honor its obligations under the purchase agreement.”
Agrawal said that outside the company, it’s difficult to meaningfully count the number of bots or determine who counts in Twitter’s daily active user reports, which can be monetized.