Elon Musk said on Saturday that Twitter Inc.’s legal team accused him of breaching a confidentiality agreement by revealing that the sample size for the social media platform’s checks on automated users was 100.
“Twitter lawyers just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot’s verification sample size is 100!” Musk, CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Inc., tweeted.
Musk said on Friday that his $44 billion cash purchase deal was “temporarily on hold” while he awaits data on the proportion of his fake accounts.
The executive said his team would test “a random sample of 100 followers” on Twitter to identify the bots. His response to a question prompted Twitter’s accusation.
When a user asked Musk
Elon, can you elaborate a bit on the "process"? So that we as Twitter can help you in finding out the real percentage of scam/spam/bot accounts
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) May 14, 2022
to “elaborate on the bot account filtering process,” he replied
Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling.
I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
“I chose 100 as the sample size number, because that’s what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”
Musk tweeted early Sunday morning that he has yet to see “any” analytics showing the social media company has less than 5% fake accounts.
He later said “there’s some chance it’s more than 90% of daily active users.”