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Twitter is looking to provide Elon Musk access to its “firehose” of raw data on tweets posted daily, as reported by the Washington Post citing an anonymous source “familiar with the company’s thinking.”
Musk has asked for the information, claiming that the social media business he agreed to buy for $44 billion is underreporting the number of users who are automated “spam bots.”
However, the New York Times reported that it is not clear if Musk will get full or partial access to the data “firehose.”
In an SEC filing, Musk accused Twitter of breaching the agreement by not providing him with sufficient data on the platform’s composition of spam accounts.
In response, Twitter told reporters that it has and will continue to communicate information with Musk to complete the acquisition under the merger agreement’s conditions.
Musk’s team claimed that the accuracy of this data is essential in gaining funding for Elon’s Twitter bid as Twitter relies on its reach statistics to maximize its primary ad revenue.
The team said that if a considerable number of its users are fake individuals, the deal alters dramatically.
Third-party academics have backed up Musk’s mistrust of Twitter’s sub-5% assertion about spam and bogus accounts.
A research by GlobalData, a data analytics firm, found that around 10% of Twitter’s active users upload spam content. However, the business recognized that determining what constitutes a “spam” account is problematic.
The study looked at nearly 4 million tweets from 20,976 different accounts. GlobalData picked these accounts by gathering data from Twitter every three hours for 22 iterations before deciding on sample size.
Data scientist Sidharth Kumar said that an account that only retweets news articles might be flagged as a bot, but it may be a real user who does not post original content.
“Incessant tweeting of non-original content can be considered spam, but some may choose to see it as a very active user sharing articles/opinions,” Kumar explained.
Twitter has consistently claimed that only about 5% of accounts on the platform are spam since going public in 2013.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
