Elon Musk said early Tuesday that his deal to buy Twitter will not move forward until the company proves that less than 5 percent of its accounts are fake. Musk, responding to a tweet from a Tesla-focused media company, said that some analyses had found Twitter to be as much as 20 percent fake, which would be four times what Twitter publicly claims in its filings. Twitter is full of bots, but how full, and what kinds of bots?
With estimates ranging from Twitter's own "under 5 percent" to independent researchers suggesting 20% or more, it's clearly a tricky number to nail down, as the company's CEO, Parag Agrawal, explained in a thread on May 17, 2022. Prospective buyer Elon Musk responded with a poo emoji. Agrawal pointed out that spam and bots are serious problems that all social media platforms contend with, and more importantly they are an evolving and "dynamic".
According to the 2022 Imperva Bad Bot Report, bad bots accounted for a record-setting 27.7% of all global website traffic in 2021, up from 25.6% in 2020. The three most common bot attacks were account takeover (ATO), content or price scraping, and scalping to obtain limited-availability items.
Another interesting highlight from the report showed mobile user agents being a popular disguise for bad bot traffic in 2021, accounting for more than one-third of all internet traffic, increasing from 28.1% in 2020. Mobile Safari was a popular agent in 2021 because bad bots exploited the browser's improved user privacy settings to mask their behaviour, making them harder to detect.
Musk said last week the deal was "temporarily on hold" over the issue of fake accounts, though he reiterated then that he was still committed to buying the company. It was not clear then if any steps had been taken to halt the deal.
Since there are indications that Musk might be rethinking the deal, Twitter's share prices have dropped amid a broader market slowdown. Twitter's market capitalization (its value as a company based on its stock price) was about $28.6 billion as of early Tuesday.
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