After recent tweets by the prospective owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal decided to respond to Musk.Â
We reported how Elon Musk, the potential future owner of Twitter, tweeted out about the bots on Twitter over the weekend.
In response, Parag Agrawal decided to respond to Musk’s remarks. He started by agreeing that spam harms Twitter.
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.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
He then said that spam is dynamic and hard to catch.
Some final context: fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work! You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Some of the spam can look totally legit. Really…
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.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
The Twitter team tries to stop spam…
Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Then Twitter makes a determination of each account. (Determination to censor conservatives?)
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.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Our actual internal estimates…
Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Agrawal appears like he really cares about the subject. (whatever)
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 Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Agrawal offers more info on how to look at Twitter’s efforts (to censor conservatives).
For those of you who want to learn more in the meantime: https://t.co/3zShh9dbMjhttps://t.co/njNfHHGrZq
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
Elon Musk responded to CEO’s Parag Agrawal’s tweets with a simple response. (BS)
💩
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022
