Twitter has very 'bot-friendly' rules, says Elon Musk amid hold on takeover

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday once again raised the presence of fake/spam accounts or 'bots' on Twitter, saying the micro-blogging platform has 'very bot-friendly' rules.

Musk has put the $44 billion Twitter buyout on hold till its CEO Parag Agrawal tells him the exact percentage of bots on the platform. Twitter currently says less that 5 per cent of accounts on its platforms can be fake.

A follower tagged Musk, posting "current technical Twitter Limits": "None of these @Twitter limits are aligned with the goal of human-to-human interactions @elonmusk."

"Like 1 tweet every 36 seconds during 24 hours is not human behaviour. Neither is changing your account's email address 4 times per hour," the follower asked Musk.

The Tesla CEO replied: "Totally, these are very bot-friendly rules!"

The Twitter technical limits say that for Direct Messages (DMs), the limit is 1,000 messages sent per day, while for tweets, it is 2,400 per day.

The "change to account email" is 4 per hour and the technical "follow limit" is 400 per day.

Musk has asked the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to probe whether Twitter's claim on the number of its user base is true.

While Twitter said in its SEC filing that less than 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users (mDAUs) are fake, Musk believes the number of bots is four times higher.

Musk mentioned that the Twitter CEO publicly refused to show proof of less than 5 per cent bots.

"20 per cent fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be much higher. My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate," Musk wrote.

"Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of less than 5 per cent. This deal cannot move forward until he does," he had added.

Musk, at a conference in Miami this month, said that Twitter could have at least four times more fake accounts than what has been revealed in its filing.

--IANS

na/ksk/