They define active as having tweeted in the last 90 days.
I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or their assumptions are a bit off.
Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article):
1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently
2) Accounts with low number of tweets
3) Accounts with a low number of followers
4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image
Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority of twitter users don't tweet very much.
I am the same, in fact my account has never posted a thing ever, never liked at thing ever, I just follow people I want to see updates from that is all.
I think it's connected to a more general phenomenon though. Pewdiepie has 111 million subscribers on YT and gets like 3-5 million views per video. Like 95% of his subscribers don't watch his videos.
Elon already knew this of course. Buying Twitter was just an excuse to sell Tesla stock at a peak while avoiding suspicion. Now he’s teeing up his excuse to pull out. /conspiracy
I don't think this is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation is this: Musk's primary source of financing is Tesla stock. The sudden market downturn took a big chunk out of Tesla stock, which made his financial situation more difficult.
The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position much easier.
Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of the tech market.
It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in valuation.
This is what I was thinking too. People would panic if he sold that much stock. But if he's just taking out a loan to buy another company it's no big deal.
Elon pledges Tesla stock as collateral, Tesla stock goes down. Announces deal 'on hold', Tesla stock goes up. Unless he can get the price of Twitter down to where he does not have to use Tesla as collateral, its just a bad purchase decision.
Or he actually wants to own Twitter and drives up its value by making Twitter known to every person on the internet. Bad news are good news.
It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good investment.
Your mental random number generator, or the keys you're willing to type one handedly for a bit, represent only 50% of the 10 Arabic numerals in use today.
With a proper keyboard including a 10-key, I can reach all 10 of those Arabic numerals with one hand. I find your logic equally as flawed as the statistic. You sir, must be a spambot account!
AFAIK he doesn't even have a way out of paying the full buying price. The breakup fee does not allow him to abritarly invoke it. It is only conditional on finance, of which the banks have already given binding commitments. Matt Levine has a great article on it [1].
Analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk
TL;DR is that it may or may not be enough to justify it in court if Twitter sues, but it probably is enough to make a court case necessary, and Twitter's board may be reluctant to spend years in court trying to win their case, since inevitably the court case would involve the very public airing of facts like this that would not paint Twitter in a good light.
That's true, and the Twitter shareholders should have realized who they are dealing with. But that does not mean that tying themselves up a court case for several years is smart because it appears that in fact they are willing to sell.
Well, the threat was there to bypass the board of directors, controlled by big long-term investors, and go directly to the shareholders, many of whom would be happy to cash out for short-term gain. So the board was under major pressure to agree, even if they were somewhat reluctant.
I'm loathe to invoke "4D Chess" but I can't help but think this may have been a tactical decision to either lower the price of Twitter before the purchase, or to impugn its reputation without actually buying the company.
Elon hasn’t required the board to do anything. He signed an agreement to purchase the company with no due diligence or backout clauses. If he tries to get out now he’ll see Twitter in court.
I thought the SEC filings both have a number and a risk of being wrong?
Re:parroting, while that seems to have been a pejorative, I wasn't actually copying from anywhere, just a smb executive sensitive to this sort of thing during m&a as standard business discussions, so it's interesting that it's being repeated enough to accuse people here of 'parrot'ing!
There is no hard number. It mentions that they are just an estimate and could be off. They are labeled as MAUs, so that gives a lot of leniency depending on how "active" they are. It doesn't define bots either.
The SEC filings thing has been repeated even by Musk himself. It doesn't really help him.
Holy revisionist history. The “valuation” is $54.20 per share because Elon is a child and thought he was
being clever when he made that offer. Twitter simply accepted it.
Is it way above fair market value (especially in the time between his offer and today)? Absolutely.
>The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares
Absolutely! When the board demanded that Musk pay $54.20 per share – which is a completely rational number that they demanded from Musk and not a meme number that he made up himself – they underestimated his ability to do Math, and he's about to show them what's what.
One of the core duties of a Board of Directors for a publicly traded company is to arrive at a valuation of the stock each morning before the markets open. It's a shame that this board is either incompetent or corrupt and came up with the number $54.20 based on bot accounts. Musk is having his people do a complete audit of 100 random followers of the @Twitter account to find the true number. I expect the terms of this deal to change significantly in Musk's favor.
It's too bad that this distracts him from shipping the Cyber Truck, going to Mars, and then building a 1.6km tunnel under Las Vegas (a feat which has never before been achieved).
Praying for a quick resolution so we can finally get some Free Speech on the Twitter platform.
"Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others..."
If the figures for Elon Musk and Donald Trump's followers are at all accurate, it's over 50% for large accounts. Which means that the people who probably care most about whether or not their followers are real (e.g. those who might be charged for the privilege of using Twitter to communicate with large numbers easily), are the ones most likely to have mostly bots.
I could see why this might impact the value of Twitter as a company.
I am guessing that it makes sense that very high profile people will have a higher percentage of fake followers than an ordinary, small account would because many of these fake accounts are bots that are set up in order to get attention for whatever they're selling or promoting by interacting with high profile accounts.
Well, there are different bots for different purposes.
A bot operated to post advert messages might want to post them on high profile accounts.
A bot for a "500 followers for $5" company might be more likely to follow low-profile accounts, with some random activity/follows thrown in as camouflage.
A bot operated to amplify certain messages/opinions might follow accounts of middling visibility, and focus on likes rather than more visible activity.
I signed up with a vpn and got banned for life after a single nonsense tweet about not liking the feed and following 4-5 famous people. I don’t think bot detection techniques are very robust
> This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t).
In other words, their model performs well on their training set, and they don’t acknowledge that it may be over fitted or mislabeled, and they hand wave mistakes
they're robust at generating false positives! i got insta-locked for, i think, signing up using my own email domain, to make an account that shares pictures i took of geese. it took about 4 months to wait for them to unlock it
meanwhile, saudi bot armies apparently basically run rampant across the platform
I'm 6 months into my account and they still haven't asked for a phone number. I mean, I have one ready if they ask for it. Maybe I've been whitelisted as a non-bad-faith actor due to my timezone and other factors.
Its get even worse than that. I have a test account with about 10,000 followers (mostly real people, you can tell), created via home-used IP, and few days after Musk tweet comparing Gates to Emoji of pregnant man, I did exact same tweet! With exact same punctuation, images, icons, everything.
Less than 2 days later I am banned for "spewing hatred based on sex, gender or religion". No amount of replies that my tweet was same as another but much much more popular account helped. Banned for life.
> Our systems do not, however, attempt to identify Twitter accounts that may be irregularly operated by a human but have some automated behaviors (e.g. a company account with multiple users, like our own @SparkToro, or a community account run by a single person, like Aleyda Solis’ @CrawlingMondays). We cannot know how Twitter (or Mr. Musk) might choose to classify these accounts, but we bias to a relatively conservative interpretation of “Spam/Fake.”
So this means:
* @EmojiAquarium - spam/fake
* @threateningcake - not spam/fake
* @CanYouPetTheDog - spam/fake
* @ChuckGrassley - not spam/fake (?? - what fraction are staff generated vs Chuck?)
* @Wendys - spam/fake
* @Twitter - spam/fake
So politicians and rich are announcing new laws and their stuff mostly to bots while a casual visitor sees a login wall. Nice. Throw it to a volcano with IG, FB and remaining American "internet" 1/8
"We undercount active users whose accounts are protected, accounts that view tweets but don’t send any, and accounts that log in and engage in other ways beyond tweeting (like favoriting or adding profiles to lists)."
My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio between lurkers and active posters.
Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and, these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother customizing their profile.
so much of this thread is 'proof' that supports whatever elon musk is trying to do, but seems to not realize this is a totally independent actor making a dubious set of assumptions to come to a number. This analysis might be interesting because it is timely but it has no bearing on the musk twitter acquisition anymore than me running such an analysis does.
I remember when I found out I was a bot. It was during a harrowing judgement conflict with an image-based captcha about traffic lights, and caused a complete shutdown of my higher order processes. To this day, I still don't know the threshold of how much traffic light actually needs to be in a square to be considered for selection, so I just stopped logging in to everything.
Yea, I have an account that is literally just for reading 3 peoples' tweets (they're former generals that frequently comment on Russia's invasion of Ukraine). I have their timelines bookmarked, and just read the threads they post.
If you have not tweeted.. you are excluded from this analysis.
A spam account is gonna spam right? But some real users of twitter may only tweet once a year. This study just doesn't include you. It isn't saying you are spam, just not including you in the count.
The population of accounts that tweet is going to contain a larger proportion of spammers than the population of active Twitter accounts. Presenting the former as the latter is disingenuous.
There are probably many 'fake' or bot accounts that don't tweet; they'd be used to prop up the 'likes' or views of other accounts, either customers paying for exposure, or other bots.
Yeah, but it's just clickbait then. An honest title would be "We sampled users that act like bots on Twitter and found out that lots of them were bots".
Says a user named "Followerwonk" ... to be fair, they do profer a method for reproducing their results. I am guessing that there are some bots they are missing ... ones that are close to passing the Turing Test.
My personal impression from using Twitter for years is that the actual number may be twice as high, more like 40% than 20%. The researchers repeatedly say that they were very conservative in their estimates and only counted accounts that were extremely likely to be spam. "This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t)."
PROTIP: You can search Twitter by URL. Just search for a popular news article on Twitter, and you can see the massive number of obviously non-human accounts who are tweeting the article.
I don't think this post means as much as people are acting like it does.
The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality.
Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.
Just out of interest, imagine you were in a hot desert. There is a tortoise in front of you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without for your help. But you're not helping. Why?
My main account literally has “fake account” in the description as sort of a joke, because I really use Twitter exclusively for browsing, and maybe liking/RT’ing stuff.
But hey maybe with these kind of analysis, and rando computer generated / un-appealable bans in the the future the "real accounts" will just mean "very elaborate bot".
This is a terrible metric. Real people use the location field for all sorts of non-location purposes, as well as more freeform descriptions of their location that wouldn't resolve mechanically.
Mine as well. I deliberately have not set a profile image, and have not attracted many followers. I probably should not bother with Twitter but I am around and am a real human.
1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive. This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their results.
2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as monetizable as high-volume posters.
I was offered $300 for my twitter account, I suppose partially on the basis that I haven’t tweeted much, but I use it daily to weekly though don’t tweet often, one tweet in last 2 years or so.
It sounds like you are genuinely a non-active user, and probably not interesting from the PoV of Twitter/acquirers or the GP poster. This thread is about lurkers: people who regularly log in and read their feed (thus consuming ads and being relevant from Twitter's business perspective), but who don't post and would thus be excluded using the methodology of TFA.
Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.
Lurkers are also the most important people. They consume the content. They are the meat of the business, the ones that respond to advertising and political messaging. If I were twitter I would champion all the lurker accounts, all the eyeballs to which twitter serves content. Nobody ever faulted the Nielson ratings scheme for "lurker" viewers who only watched but didn't themselves create television shows.
Yes and no, just like any major media platform, huge majority of tweets being seen are from a very small group of influencers/popular person. That's why when you join twitter, it suggests to you a lot of people to follow that are already big.
You don't really need that many people to submit content though. I imagine most YouTube users have never uploaded a single video, and they don't need to, since there's basically no end to available content there.
Twitter specifically added the annoying feature of your likes being shown to your followers so that lurkers would be actively contributing to the algorithm though.
As long as lurkers are "liking" content, their local network will see an engagement increase.
This is a second-order objective though. The goal is to show ads to humans on the platform. Having a lot of human authors (or any kind of content authors) generating content is a way to achieve the goal, not a goal in itself.
There are other ways to achieve the goal, such as making ads more relevant (targeted advertising), having users consume more of the same content (recommendation), having the same content take longer to consume (periscope). Growing the number of human posters is definitely not a requirement.
Definitely agree. I joined Twitter four months ago. I haven't tweeted yet, but I'm reading it daily on the app and occasionally liking tweets.
I've been so surprised at how effective the advertising has been on me. I've never experienced this level of engagement with online marketing.
Ads for TV shows, movies, live shows, musicians and comedians have been particularly effective.
I've found myself following a lot of show writers I've never heard of, and I even signed up for some new streaming services because of it. Google and Facebook ads never felt like they impacted me, though I know how important and dominant they are to business marketers. I've never clicked on a banner ad and my eyes glaze over sponsored links. Twitter's level of engagement with their marketing content is new to me, and I'm impressed.
I actively work to block or prevent ad tracking. When youtube serves me an ad for retirement planning or feminine hygiene products, that is my little victory. That is me successfully preventing them from knowing enough about me to target ads.
If an account is in lurk mode, then its not a spammer so I'm okay with it being left out of that equation.
Where I might agree with you is a lurk mode account could become collateral damage in being considered fake. Lurkers don't retweet though. An account with a million followers isn't seen by everyone. Having a portion of that million like/retweet amplifies even further with their network now possibly seeing something from someone they are not following directly.
I'd be willing to accept that the number of lurkers that get lumped in with fake accounts when deciding the percentage of actual eyeballs on posts is not harmful. Those numbers are made up stats anyways. Like the old days of TV/Radio stations that covered large cities with millions of citizens. They would claim they have an audience in the millions even though a small fraction were actually watching/listening.
Except the question isn't about the pure number of spam/bot accounts, it's about the ratio of spam/bots to "authentic" users. If you leave out the lurkers, that ratio gets skewed to mistakenly inflate the bot count.
First off, I don't give 2 shits about twitter, so I don't care if the numbers are skewd in either direction. This is more of an interest in seeing how SV stats/metrics are just a game. Just so that's out there.
A lurker isn't an active user in my opinion. Maybe that's not the same understanding as accepted definition. The lurkers might be absorbing some of the ad content, but they are not helping create new avenues for ads to be shared. Twitter's ad share surface area would increase tremendously if every user was actively producing tweets. That's the only metric that they are concerned. They don't care about how many people actually see the ads once they are there. They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
Why are lurkers not helping numbers? It's the exact same as Youtube, do you expect majority of lurkers on YouTube to not be counted because they didn't create a video? People follow what is already out there and ads target the people watching.
> They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
I don’t follow this.. Lurkers are they eyeballs presumably.
If everyone on twitter tweeted the same amount it would probably just drown out the popular accounts and create a more diffuse and less profitable ad space I think.
>> They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
>I don’t follow this.. Lurkers are they eyeballs presumably.
The number of eyeballs allows for the price per ad to increase while the number of places ads can be placed increase the volume of ads. If lurkers are not helping to increase the volume, it doesn't make the platform as much money. Proving the lurkers are actually consuming the ads and making the ad buyer happy is non-trivial. Proving the lurkers are worth increasing the price per ad is also non-trivial. In the end, I personally feel like it is a wash by lurkers being overly represented in the fake account numbers.
Volume of ads is irrelevant. An additional tweet to attach an ad to does not generate revenue if there is nobody looking at it. On the other hand, though, an additional set of eyeballs on an existing monetized tweet does generate additional revenue.
As an extreme example, a single monetized tweet with a billion viewers generates money. A billion monetized tweet with one viewer obviously does not..
And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always vastly outnumber people who post content on any platform. If lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5% and twitter’s “<5%” figure is accurate.
Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority, creates a sort of echo chamber.
I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.
My account was active until recently (deleted when Twitter accepted Musk's offer, I don't need to be a participant in a right wing cesspool). I have 0 tweets. I don't like things, because I don't want my name attached to someone else.
But one can say that 20% of the content on the platform was distributed by bots.
Meaning that all the Lurkers have to consider if they are really interested in content, that was pushed by some bot-farms.
Technically, every user of this platform has to take a step back and evaluate, if anything they have seen is not pushed content by some bots.
20% is huge and I am curios if there will ever be some comparable "official" numbers to that.
No - you can say that 20% of the accounts actively posting are spam/bots.
It's possible they are posting MUCH more or less than 20% of the content.
If these are skewed toward the high end of producers - the 80/20 rule would say that as much as 80% of the content could come from them. Still - it's possible this content isn't interacted with much outside of other bots. You can't draw many conclusions from such a limited data point.
I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again.
Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?
They could maybe use like activity in addition to just tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then an external organization isn’t going to have insight into that.
As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
> Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data.
It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings:
>We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
>... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications.
Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
This doesn’t resolve the issue the article has though. I’m a mDAU because I’ve logged in, yet there is no way for the people writing the article to know that I’m active.
I would imagine Twitter would have access to analytics that third parties don't have, which would allow them to pretty easily work out which accounts are logged in and used for browsing and which are actually abandoned.
Opening a Twitter link in a private tab is the low complexity solution, or there's nitter.net, or deleting cookies, or various browser extensions that delete cookies for you.
After posting that, I went back and retested. It looks like they have swapped back to a soft nag popup. For a few months it was hard blocking any further scrolling, at least with Chrome.
their TL;DAbstract refers to this as a 'conservative' methodology, that is 'rigorous', and 'likely undercounts.
Their definition:
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
They note the following to differentiate fake and spam:
> Many “fake” accounts under this definition are neither nefarious nor problematic. ... By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance.
Some general data analytics notes from their post:
* Then lump together fake and spam in their analysis - and this really matters! somewhere like NYT is both 'fake' meaning it isn't a real person and A HIGHLY VALUABLE ACCOUNT for twitter to have.
* They use a sample of 44,058 accounts (of ~1.047B)
* They look at a number of classifying variables (17), spam accounts met 10+ of those 17 criteria. They don't list all 17.
* The criteria were developed from a "machine learning process" that is undescribed, and was developed from a sample of 35,000 'known' fake twitter followers bought from 3 vendors and 50,000 claimed non-spam accounts. They appear (imply?) to have used 50% training 50% real data but dont't specify explicitly.
* They say their model is about 65% accurate, and unlikely to produce false positives ("almost never includes false positives") - however they don't list any specificity, sensitivity, etc. that would be useful to evaluating that claim.
* The analysis does no statistical tests, no confidence intervals, minimal information about how the model was tested or validated.
* Critically: they note, but do not describe or quantify, that a lot of the criteria are highly correlated
* then later in the article they suddenly seem to switch to a 10 point scale for quality away from their 17 point scale? with a threshold of 3 or below as low quality?
* My personal twitter account meets most of the metrics where they have listed a quantifiable threshold. And their fake followers tool lists it as pretty f'ing suspicious - i.e., low quality.
I'm not saying there wrong but I am saying good luck getting this from a blog post to any sort of respectable science publication. As they note at the end, they aren't even calculating the same metric - twitter uses monetizable daily active users - remember NYtimes? Absolutely a monetizable account - even if it isn't a real person.
anyone who thinks this is proof of Elon's 4D chess based on this article is, to me, frankly delusional.
Yeah, and I fully expect that these numbers went up recently with Twitter requiring login to view threads.
The fact that they add a .42% is a red flag in itself, especially when they admit in their own post that they agree that their analysis is deserving of critique. Very misleading stuff.
Their analysis using purchased bots seems a bit more reasonable.
“Passive” accounts may actually be more likely to be bots as many services sell fake followers. It’s just harder to detect with public information rather than their IP addressees etc.
Similarly I don’t think there is any way to separate active vs abandoned passive accounts as a 3rd party.
Well, I've been actively trying to create a new Twitter account for a little under a month and Twitter thinks I'm a bot. I've made 1 tweet and followed 5 people.
Even paid for Twitter Blue...still thinks I'm not real. Support is unreachable.
My current plan is to wait til Elon completes the takeover and then build an entire site dedicated to getting Elon's attention to unlock my account...because that's the only way to contact somebody apparently.
Edit add: I find it horrible that we have companies that you can not contact, in fact they seem to be going out of their way to make hard to contact them.
Even things you pay money for, like airline tickets. They want you to email them, make the phone number hard to find. So you do, they don't respond and then you have to search and call them, wait an hour or more on hold. The agents are nice but the entire process is terrible.
Earlier I had to do that for a damaged luggage claim. Went through the automated phone assistant to get to damaged luggage claims and it gave the option to use text messages. So I give it a try, nope. They can't resolve the issue through text, has to be on the phone. So I had to call back, re-enter all the info through the automated system and then ignore it's pleadings to use the text system.
Turning on my cynicism switch on a bit. The author is a very good content marketer. A hot topic in our corner of the world — which is author’s target audience — is Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk tweeted that the percentage of bots is the main issue of the deal. He disputed Twitter’s number of 5%.
I believe the author writing prompt was just: a headline about fake Twitter accounts showing a number significantly higher that 5%. That’s it. Whatever the methodology, that was the author’s goal.
The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.
You seem to be arguing against something that the article doesn't claim. The article isn't equating inactivity and fake/spam, but that: of the accounts that actively send tweets ~20% are fake/spam.
Sure that's a different question from what proportion of all users are fake/spam, but this is still a perfectly valid question to ask, and the fact that they're only considering active users is in the title so I really don't get your complaint.
If you want an analysis that attempts to answer a different question go find or write one that addresses the question you want answered...
The article clearly states (emphasis mine):
> This represents the largest set of accounts on Twitter we could acquire, but it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users).
From the linked Twitter earnings report:
> We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
It is valid criticism because the context of this article is that Elon Musk wants to know whether Twitter's own claims of ~5% fake/spam accounts is accurate. We do really want an analysis that investigates that precise question and not a related one.
According to Matt Levine, that's "not how any of this works". The $1B is if he could not secure financing, but it appears we are now past that point. The relevant question is whether the Twitter board wants to sue in court to compel a sale.
Given what Musk does to the personal lives of his opponents, I'm not sure I would want to fight him. But given how many laws and rules he's broken at the point, I think there is a clear failure of justice if he can just do whatever he feels like without repercussions due to his common popularity.
Twitter requires users to log in before lurking so their definition of activity is intentionally selective. I'd be surprised if Twitter doesn't know how active their users actually are, even the lurkers.
I read lots of tweets and don't have a Twitter account, or at least one that I've logged into in the last 10 years... The philosophical question seems to be, "am I a Twitter user"?
You could probably argue that most of the world read Twitter and hence are users, account or none. It's that pervasive.
But then there's the next question: "am I a user that reportedly matters to Twitter's business?". What people are trying to land on, in light of Elon's tweet that the deal is on hold pending investigation of Twitter's metrics reporting, seems to be a framework for carving out what exactly constitutes a user that brings the platform revenue that shows up in quarterly reports and hence would directly relate to the tangible value of the enterprise.
In reality, nobody knows what numbers are being thrown around behind closed doors. This article is just one framing.
Look, there are dozens of potentially interesting and valuable questions to ask on this subject. Answers to which may produce a wide range of insights and conclusions. And there's a whole potential conversation about which questions are most important, that may have different answers depending on the context.
But there's no reason to pin the whole frame of the conversation to the one question for which Twitter corporate chose to publish an answer, unless the only question we are interested in is "did Twitter technically lie" which is the most uninteresting question in this whole situation. If this is the sole context you are using to frame this issue then maybe you should consider if you're following the current news cycle a little too closely.
The idea that there is such a thing as an 'inaccurate definition of active' is silly.
> I don't know, that seems more interesting than most questions that could be asked about Twitter.
Why? Twitter is a for profit corporation. If, on the balance, lying serves their interests (I'm sorry, I meant "is consistent with their fiduciary duty to their shareholders") more than edging up to the line without crossing it, that's what they will do.
Even the watchdog organizations such as the FTC and SEC that police the speech of corporations more or less limit themselves to material statements that move markets or influence consumer behavior in ways that can be considered fraudulent. The FTC, FDA, and others are concerned with a fairly narrow reading of consumer harm, the SEC is motivated by the health and trustworthiness of the public market. In any case, there pretty much always has to be some sort of alleged harm. Lying per-se is hardly ever forbidden. So if the advantages of a lie outweigh the (risk adjusted) penalties and reputational risks, that's that.
Sure. But if I'm looking to purchase Twitter, I think I'd be much more interested in and concerned about this "white" lie than you are as a general consumer.
I think a conversation about what ways we expect and permit corporations to lie, either specifically in financial statements or to the general public, is much more interesting than a discussion of exactly how many fake tweets there are and exactly how many accounts are making them, though I guess you could construe that as broadly part of the same conversation.
> I think a conversation about what ways we expect and permit corporations to lie, either specifically in financial statements or to the general public, is much more interesting than a discussion of exactly how many fake tweets there are
I agree, that would also be a much more interesting conversation than "did Twitter technically lie."
At every company I've worked at any time someone has asked "How many active users do we have?" it was a difficult question to answer because everyone's idea of "active user" was different.
"Active, as in logs in regularly? Wait, what is 'regularly'? Once a week? Once a month? Every day? Does 'active user' mean, online right now?"
Etc, etc...
Their definition of "active user" is relative, not inaccurate.
I think it's pretty easy to argue that their definition is intentionally misleading, which may not be technically inaccurate, but is arguably just as bad.
The big story in the news last week was "Elon Musk says deal on hold while verifying twitter's 5% Monthly Active Users stat", or something to that effect.
That's the context this article was published in. It is transparently obvious they are re-using the word "active twitter accounts" to cause confusion with the definition of "active" that has been being bandied around. The post is using such a title as a clickbait, to hop aboard a trend.
I think the title, and lack of significant clarification in the article, make it clearly misleading, and I don't think pedantic "well technically active can have multiple definitions" changes the reality of the situation meaningfully.
> Why? Twitter included lurkers in its dataset, this article didn't, why should that impact stats in the direction of fake accounts being smaller?
Because you usually don't create fake accounts to lurk, but to do "something".
I'm speculating, but even when you create bots to boost follower counts you'd probably make them post now and then so as to seem "active".
It makes sense that the proportion of tweeting accounts being bots is much higher than the proportion of lurkers. And since there are also more lurkers in turn than posters, I would say that the real number is much lower than that.
I don't buy the speculation as obviously accurate.
Let's say I own a twitter bot farm. I make 20k accounts, have a system setup that logs into each of them from a unique IP each month at random times to make sure they're not banned yet, and advertise it out. On month 1, someone buys 1000 of them as followers. On month 2, someone buys 1000 of them to tweet spam. etc etc.
Each month, there's 20k active bot accounts (logged in to verify they weren't banned). Only a small number may actually tweet though since buyers may have not gotten them yet. Bot accounts lurk too, for months on end, before ever acting.
I'm not claiming this is accurate, but I am claiming this is a reasonable alternative which doesn't align with the view of bot accounts being more prevalent in tweeting accounts than lurking accounts.
A metric they've artificially inflated by gating tweets, which works to their advantage when calculating spam. With that in mind, I think I'm more inclined to look at spam as a percentage of active tweeters and ignore lurkers.
I thought the parent was criticizing Twitter's active monthly user definition, which only includes people who have tweeted in the past 90 days. The article used this definition of active use as well.
In the light of Musk's statements, which presumably precipitated this timely article, I would say the question of whether Twitter technically lied is the most important question for Musk doing the things he does.
If you're more interested in Twitter's ecosystem as a whole, it is less interesting.
"Active user" is a common industry term with a well-defined meaning. It's misleading to use it to mean something else, particularly when there are a number of more appropriate choices, e.g. "20% of Twitter posters".
The article clearly defines those accounts as "active" because it's the only way an external observer can somehow isolate an "active" group. Only twitter can know how many users are "lurkers".
And since they are trying most probably to get some PR for their company, they use their specific definition of "active Twitter account".
It's not an active account if by "active" they mean "generating content". While Twitter isn't a typical content aggreagation site like Youtube or Reddit, tweets are still "content" in the sense that they drive further user engagement on the site.
Words used to mean things. The current HN submission title just says active, heavily implying accounts with any kind of activity (eg. like, follow/unfollow), not "users who Tweet".
Sure, clickbait headlines are the norm and the devil lurks in the details, but still, many comments have been spent on this, because it's clearly misleading.
~80% of email is spam, it doesn't surprise anyone, because it's so cheap to send spam. Similarly it's easy to create fake accounts and spam, yet it doesn't mean much.
Who's counted as "engaged"? The people reading, or only the people writing? More to the point, if Twitter moved to a subscription model, would zero lurkers buy in?
Seems like social network aren't interested in counting those that don't use all potential features of the platform. I'd say a lurker/ghost member is definitely an active account.
I would say that if someone is able to be advertised to (since that is what makes the business money) then they should be counted. So yes, there should be no requirement to tweet to be counted.
Interesting. This could be a bracketing error, because I read
> it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit
> Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users)
As implying that they think accounts that haven't tweeted in the past 90 days don't fit Twitter's mDAU definition. Given the placement of the qualifying phrase, I think that's a reasonable parsing of the sentence, but I see your point that they could be trying to imply their set doesn't fit the definition. If so, that sentence is very badly constructed.
The full quote doesn't do SparkToro and Followerwonk any credit:
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
The fact that they don't even consider the concept of a non-tweeting lurker to be an mDAU brings their entire analysis into question. Let's face it - Twitter is an emotionally-charged enough place, and tweets have such a way of living forever and being taken out of context, that there are many who use it to consume (and perhaps Like) content but will not tweet publicly. These people are still viewing and engaging with advertisements! Twitter absolutely should consider them monetizable!
But of course, engagement data on lurkers is internal only, and Likes data counts against global API caps: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tweets/lik.... Which means that SparkToro and Followerwonk are incentivized to ignore these users. That they do ignore them, and don't address it anywhere in their methodology, is highly suspect.
When you are in the context of :
- Twitter determine the active status of an account using login
- People are wondering the % of active users as defined per the twitter metrics
But then use your own definition of active and write only a one liner on the difference with no reflection on the impact it might have and no warning on the fact you are answering a different question.
Then my conclusion is you want people to make this mistake.
> EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
Made me laugh because you had to add it and made more effort than the author of the article to prevent the confusion :D.
That edit was made 40m before you joined the conversation. Noting your edits is a social convention and voluntary concession offered by a posts' author to validate replies that were made before the edit, while clarifying the authors intended message for future readers. If those future readers use the content of the edit message to shallowly refute the post, consider the incentive this creates to not follow that convention for all authors in the future. If you have a valid refutation, surely you can find evidence for such in the body of the message rather than nitpicking the edit history.
Strange rant. It's not about you editing your post in general. It's that your edit shows that saying "active accounts" when you really mean "accounts that have recently tweeted" is wrong, like the very title of this submission.
I think you misunderstood their response. They are saying that the study has an unusual definition of "active", and that your need to clarify the definition proves that it is unusual.
Though personally I think filtering specifically for users that actively send tweets makes sense, since that's really what matters when it comes to measuring how healthy and authentic the discourse is
It seems like everyone is arguing about different metrics and it makes more sense to discuss different, specific measures that might fall into a range of behaviors that are "active" in some sense rather than focusing on which definition of "active" is somehow the best one.
What would be more interesting would be to adapt this and answer several different questions about the proportion of spam among accounts with different metrics of activity to see how things change. For example, does the percentage of spam accounts go down a lot if we lower the bar for "active"? How much & how fast?
Twitter's quarterly earnings define active users thusly:
> Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.
I'm pretty sure I've heard a similar definition from Facebook.
This definition supports g-clef's critique that the article picks an unorthodox way to measure active users, resulting in an inflated percentage of accounts being measured as spam/fake accounts, vs what the percentage would be if measured against Twitter's definition of 'active', which includes lurkers.
For manipulation / spam purposes I don't really care about accounts that don't actively post/like/retweet/follow. The mDAU isn't useful at all for determining if the activity on Twitter is done largely by bots.
I do wonder how "fake" is calculated. Is @tweetsfrommydog fake? It's a real person making tweets that are funny and provide value to the platform, but it's not a real person as an individual tweeting their personal thoughts, are corporate accounts or parody accounts fake?
The article is just clickbait. The title is obviously clickbait (based on your edit you've realized that "active account" !== "accounts that tweet"). Then they try to define active account:
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
Ok, but "consuming the activity on their timeline" is essentially unknowable outside of Twitter, since you can't see what tweets people are viewing. It turns out they're trying to infer this through some other signals like follower count, etc. But you can imagine why that might be sketchy.
Then they constrain the analysis:
> A more fair assessment of Mr. Musk’s Twitter following would only include accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days
Let's be real, if you look at a list of Elon tweet replies, they might as well all be spam. Just search @elonmusk and sort by latest. Then compare that to the sorted tweet replies under an actual tweet. IDK how many millions of dollars and man-hours went into the AI that sorted this list, but it seems to just be putting the blue checks at the top and shrugging at the rest. I doubt this three man team is doing any better at spam detection.
> lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely.
I've spent many, many hours lurking on twitter, don't have an account at all, and mostly access it through nitter instances. Are they "biased" for not including me?
edit: should inactive users be counted as active users?
They point out that's their definitions of active accounts is a flaw in their methodology (inside the article). However, I think it's fair to say that while TWTR has better internal insight into an "active user", it's the best approximation one can do from the outside.
I do wonder about, given perfect knowledge, how the bot accounts would shake up. What percentage produce content (presumably propaganda, automatic tweets using it as an RSS like announcement service, and spam) vs follow people (boost follow accounts, sell likes)?
Probably forced to since they do not have access to login information. Especially since if you do not post but login you are certainly not a spammer ^^, could still be bot crawling.
But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that less 50% of US users tweet five times a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75% as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using survey I believe so should include only active users and no spam/bot.
So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that the 25% less active users might not even post every two month (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back a quarter of the 80% they found as active.
Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example, but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done some good work ;).
There was this suggestion to conduct a sting operation of displaying captcha to a sample of users to determine the % of the bots.
Probably picking the sample is still challenging but at least can somewhat tell if the accounts in the sample are genuine.
The method in this article is so flawed that Larry Ellison, founder of a famous law firm, would count as an inactive account since haven't tweeted since 2012[0] and that person apparently looks into investing in Twitter[1]. How can be investing a billion in Twitter when he doesn't use Twitter at all?
> They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks),
This is not their definition, that's what Twitter considers an active account in their revenue reports.
> has no relation
It has some relation, no? I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between how frequently a user sends tweets and how monetizable that user is.
>They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely.
All true. However, do you really believe that a bot is more likely to be active than a real user? If so, fair play to you. If not, then we would expect inactive users to be bots in an even greater proportion than what we see among active users.
We can argue about what the article did and didn't imply, but what's interesting to me about the issue you raise is that among lurkers there is probably a much lower rate of fake/spam activity, since there are fewer reasons for a bot to log in and not tweet. Couple that with the fact that lurkers are generally the vast majority of users on any platform, and that alone could explain the discrepancy between Twitter's 5% number and SparkToro's 20%.
Services that sell followers and spammers "aging" accounts generally would look like lurkers. Twitter could probably get an accurate estimate with the amount of analytics they have for internal use only, but of course they might be incentivized to not try very hard.
That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots. The bots are having a huge influence on conversations, and that's important to know.
> That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots
I don't see how you can arrive at this conclusion. It depends on who you are following, with some additions by the algorithm (unless you use the chronological feed) and (speculating here) the algo pushes content from real humans.
I read tweet replies, not just tweets (apologies if I'm not using the correct terms, I'm not an active Twitter user). The original tweet may be a real user, but I often dive deep into all of the comments. If 20% of those comments are from bots, then that's a lot.
No, since you choose who you follow, you're most likely filtering for interesting stuff. I'd wager that most of the spam bots are pretty obvious to spot, and makes up very little of a user's feed.
I don't know how many original tweets are made by bots but 20% of the replies to anyone with a 5 figure follower count seems to fall on the low side of what I would guess.
Why would a uniform sample of Twitter accounts be even remotely interesting? My Twitter experience consists of people I personally know. None of them are bots.
If you took a random sample of websites you'd find that 99.995% of them are spam. That's why we have to rank search results.
So ~20% of Twitter accounts are fake; however, the last time I tried to create a Twitter account for legitimate purposes (asking some customer questions) I couldn't, just because I didn't want Twitter to have my phone number.
I check everyone I follow (mostly artists) to see if they are posting art generally, and look at most of the people who follow me to see what they do before following them back. There are a few (legit) retweeting bots and I have ignored a bunch of people because they did not seem real. I remember a set of accounts followed me that had (1) no tweets (2) avatar pic of MCU movie actor and (3) hundreds of followers.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadSomewhat alarming, if accurate.
I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or their assumptions are a bit off.
Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article):
1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently
2) Accounts with low number of tweets
3) Accounts with a low number of followers
4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image
Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority of twitter users don't tweet very much.
25% of Twitter Users Produce 97% of All Tweets: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
I treat it like RSS not Social Media
If it's 1-1 then 20% of tweets being from bots isn't great - but it could even be more than that.
I think Youtube's UI "encourages" this behaviour even more as it has a highly algorithmic homepage rather than a feed of people you follow.
The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position much easier.
Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of the tech market.
It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in valuation.
It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good investment.
The chance of no digit repeating out of 7 would be about 20%
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares, is predicated upon human users on their system and not spam accounts.
Twitter's valuation of its stock is way-overblown if there are 20% bot accounts on their platform.
Go Elon!
Re:parroting, while that seems to have been a pejorative, I wasn't actually copying from anywhere, just a smb executive sensitive to this sort of thing during m&a as standard business discussions, so it's interesting that it's being repeated enough to accuse people here of 'parrot'ing!
The SEC filings thing has been repeated even by Musk himself. It doesn't really help him.
Is it way above fair market value (especially in the time between his offer and today)? Absolutely.
Absolutely! When the board demanded that Musk pay $54.20 per share – which is a completely rational number that they demanded from Musk and not a meme number that he made up himself – they underestimated his ability to do Math, and he's about to show them what's what.
One of the core duties of a Board of Directors for a publicly traded company is to arrive at a valuation of the stock each morning before the markets open. It's a shame that this board is either incompetent or corrupt and came up with the number $54.20 based on bot accounts. Musk is having his people do a complete audit of 100 random followers of the @Twitter account to find the true number. I expect the terms of this deal to change significantly in Musk's favor.
It's too bad that this distracts him from shipping the Cyber Truck, going to Mars, and then building a 1.6km tunnel under Las Vegas (a feat which has never before been achieved).
Praying for a quick resolution so we can finally get some Free Speech on the Twitter platform.
If the figures for Elon Musk and Donald Trump's followers are at all accurate, it's over 50% for large accounts. Which means that the people who probably care most about whether or not their followers are real (e.g. those who might be charged for the privilege of using Twitter to communicate with large numbers easily), are the ones most likely to have mostly bots.
I could see why this might impact the value of Twitter as a company.
A bot operated to post advert messages might want to post them on high profile accounts.
A bot for a "500 followers for $5" company might be more likely to follow low-profile accounts, with some random activity/follows thrown in as camouflage.
A bot operated to amplify certain messages/opinions might follow accounts of middling visibility, and focus on likes rather than more visible activity.
> This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account is fake when it isn’t).
In other words, their model performs well on their training set, and they don’t acknowledge that it may be over fitted or mislabeled, and they hand wave mistakes
meanwhile, saudi bot armies apparently basically run rampant across the platform
Less than 2 days later I am banned for "spewing hatred based on sex, gender or religion". No amount of replies that my tweet was same as another but much much more popular account helped. Banned for life.
> Our systems do not, however, attempt to identify Twitter accounts that may be irregularly operated by a human but have some automated behaviors (e.g. a company account with multiple users, like our own @SparkToro, or a community account run by a single person, like Aleyda Solis’ @CrawlingMondays). We cannot know how Twitter (or Mr. Musk) might choose to classify these accounts, but we bias to a relatively conservative interpretation of “Spam/Fake.”
So this means:
* @EmojiAquarium - spam/fake * @threateningcake - not spam/fake * @CanYouPetTheDog - spam/fake * @ChuckGrassley - not spam/fake (?? - what fraction are staff generated vs Chuck?) * @Wendys - spam/fake * @Twitter - spam/fake
My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio between lurkers and active posters.
Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and, these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother customizing their profile.
I'd almost certainly be marked as a bot.
A spam account is gonna spam right? But some real users of twitter may only tweet once a year. This study just doesn't include you. It isn't saying you are spam, just not including you in the count.
Anecdotally, I know plenty of non-robot people who have twitter accounts but don't tweet.
PROTIP: You can search Twitter by URL. Just search for a popular news article on Twitter, and you can see the massive number of obviously non-human accounts who are tweeting the article.
The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality.
Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.
Just out of interest, imagine you were in a hot desert. There is a tortoise in front of you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without for your help. But you're not helping. Why?
The real question is how strong am I to flip a hundred fifty pound tortoise without injury?
Bots tweet and they usually have some sort of generic profile picture, so their methodology wouldn't even account for real bots. Bad.
Regardless, I do think that there are a lot of bots in TW and they are definitely more than 5% of total users.
Meanwhile, several accounts of mine that were predominantly run with bots would have passed as human with ease when they were active.
Are you sure you aren't a bot?
But hey maybe with these kind of analysis, and rando computer generated / un-appealable bans in the the future the "real accounts" will just mean "very elaborate bot".
This is a terrible metric. Real people use the location field for all sorts of non-location purposes, as well as more freeform descriptions of their location that wouldn't resolve mechanically.
"WTF, my account was closed because I didn't tweet in four months."
1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive. This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their results.
2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as monetizable as high-volume posters.
Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.
As long as lurkers are "liking" content, their local network will see an engagement increase.
There are other ways to achieve the goal, such as making ads more relevant (targeted advertising), having users consume more of the same content (recommendation), having the same content take longer to consume (periscope). Growing the number of human posters is definitely not a requirement.
I've been so surprised at how effective the advertising has been on me. I've never experienced this level of engagement with online marketing. Ads for TV shows, movies, live shows, musicians and comedians have been particularly effective.
I've found myself following a lot of show writers I've never heard of, and I even signed up for some new streaming services because of it. Google and Facebook ads never felt like they impacted me, though I know how important and dominant they are to business marketers. I've never clicked on a banner ad and my eyes glaze over sponsored links. Twitter's level of engagement with their marketing content is new to me, and I'm impressed.
Those are indeed incredibly valuable. Engaged audience = your real audience.
Where I might agree with you is a lurk mode account could become collateral damage in being considered fake. Lurkers don't retweet though. An account with a million followers isn't seen by everyone. Having a portion of that million like/retweet amplifies even further with their network now possibly seeing something from someone they are not following directly.
I'd be willing to accept that the number of lurkers that get lumped in with fake accounts when deciding the percentage of actual eyeballs on posts is not harmful. Those numbers are made up stats anyways. Like the old days of TV/Radio stations that covered large cities with millions of citizens. They would claim they have an audience in the millions even though a small fraction were actually watching/listening.
A lurker isn't an active user in my opinion. Maybe that's not the same understanding as accepted definition. The lurkers might be absorbing some of the ad content, but they are not helping create new avenues for ads to be shared. Twitter's ad share surface area would increase tremendously if every user was actively producing tweets. That's the only metric that they are concerned. They don't care about how many people actually see the ads once they are there. They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
I don’t follow this.. Lurkers are they eyeballs presumably.
If everyone on twitter tweeted the same amount it would probably just drown out the popular accounts and create a more diffuse and less profitable ad space I think.
The number of eyeballs allows for the price per ad to increase while the number of places ads can be placed increase the volume of ads. If lurkers are not helping to increase the volume, it doesn't make the platform as much money. Proving the lurkers are actually consuming the ads and making the ad buyer happy is non-trivial. Proving the lurkers are worth increasing the price per ad is also non-trivial. In the end, I personally feel like it is a wash by lurkers being overly represented in the fake account numbers.
As an extreme example, a single monetized tweet with a billion viewers generates money. A billion monetized tweet with one viewer obviously does not..
I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.
20% is huge and I am curios if there will ever be some comparable "official" numbers to that.
It's possible they are posting MUCH more or less than 20% of the content.
If these are skewed toward the high end of producers - the 80/20 rule would say that as much as 80% of the content could come from them. Still - it's possible this content isn't interacted with much outside of other bots. You can't draw many conclusions from such a limited data point.
I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again.
Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?
That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings:
>We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
>... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications.
Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
No idea if I should be counted or not in any particular bucket, or how anyone would know.
I have an account that is logged in, but it has only sent 7 tweets since 2014 (and they're only to customer service accounts).
No. Which is why the only reasonable thing to say as an external party is "we don't know."
Their definition:
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
They note the following to differentiate fake and spam: > Many “fake” accounts under this definition are neither nefarious nor problematic. ... By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance.
Some general data analytics notes from their post:
* Then lump together fake and spam in their analysis - and this really matters! somewhere like NYT is both 'fake' meaning it isn't a real person and A HIGHLY VALUABLE ACCOUNT for twitter to have.
* They use a sample of 44,058 accounts (of ~1.047B)
* They look at a number of classifying variables (17), spam accounts met 10+ of those 17 criteria. They don't list all 17.
* The criteria were developed from a "machine learning process" that is undescribed, and was developed from a sample of 35,000 'known' fake twitter followers bought from 3 vendors and 50,000 claimed non-spam accounts. They appear (imply?) to have used 50% training 50% real data but dont't specify explicitly.
* They say their model is about 65% accurate, and unlikely to produce false positives ("almost never includes false positives") - however they don't list any specificity, sensitivity, etc. that would be useful to evaluating that claim.
* The analysis does no statistical tests, no confidence intervals, minimal information about how the model was tested or validated.
* Critically: they note, but do not describe or quantify, that a lot of the criteria are highly correlated
* then later in the article they suddenly seem to switch to a 10 point scale for quality away from their 17 point scale? with a threshold of 3 or below as low quality?
* My personal twitter account meets most of the metrics where they have listed a quantifiable threshold. And their fake followers tool lists it as pretty f'ing suspicious - i.e., low quality.
I'm not saying there wrong but I am saying good luck getting this from a blog post to any sort of respectable science publication. As they note at the end, they aren't even calculating the same metric - twitter uses monetizable daily active users - remember NYtimes? Absolutely a monetizable account - even if it isn't a real person.
anyone who thinks this is proof of Elon's 4D chess based on this article is, to me, frankly delusional.
The fact that they add a .42% is a red flag in itself, especially when they admit in their own post that they agree that their analysis is deserving of critique. Very misleading stuff.
Their analysis using purchased bots seems a bit more reasonable.
Similarly I don’t think there is any way to separate active vs abandoned passive accounts as a 3rd party.
Even paid for Twitter Blue...still thinks I'm not real. Support is unreachable.
My current plan is to wait til Elon completes the takeover and then build an entire site dedicated to getting Elon's attention to unlock my account...because that's the only way to contact somebody apparently.
Edit add: I find it horrible that we have companies that you can not contact, in fact they seem to be going out of their way to make hard to contact them.
Even things you pay money for, like airline tickets. They want you to email them, make the phone number hard to find. So you do, they don't respond and then you have to search and call them, wait an hour or more on hold. The agents are nice but the entire process is terrible.
Earlier I had to do that for a damaged luggage claim. Went through the automated phone assistant to get to damaged luggage claims and it gave the option to use text messages. So I give it a try, nope. They can't resolve the issue through text, has to be on the phone. So I had to call back, re-enter all the info through the automated system and then ignore it's pleadings to use the text system.
I believe the author writing prompt was just: a headline about fake Twitter accounts showing a number significantly higher that 5%. That’s it. Whatever the methodology, that was the author’s goal.
The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.
It's almost like Inception isn't it? A PR stunt within a PR stunt within a PR stunt.
Sure that's a different question from what proportion of all users are fake/spam, but this is still a perfectly valid question to ask, and the fact that they're only considering active users is in the title so I really don't get your complaint.
If you want an analysis that attempts to answer a different question go find or write one that addresses the question you want answered...
The article clearly states (emphasis mine):
> This represents the largest set of accounts on Twitter we could acquire, but it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users).
From the linked Twitter earnings report:
> We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
You can file this in the 'pedo guy' cabinet of his life story where his child-ego got the better of his undoubted business skills.
Given what Musk does to the personal lives of his opponents, I'm not sure I would want to fight him. But given how many laws and rules he's broken at the point, I think there is a clear failure of justice if he can just do whatever he feels like without repercussions due to his common popularity.
You could probably argue that most of the world read Twitter and hence are users, account or none. It's that pervasive.
But then there's the next question: "am I a user that reportedly matters to Twitter's business?". What people are trying to land on, in light of Elon's tweet that the deal is on hold pending investigation of Twitter's metrics reporting, seems to be a framework for carving out what exactly constitutes a user that brings the platform revenue that shows up in quarterly reports and hence would directly relate to the tangible value of the enterprise.
In reality, nobody knows what numbers are being thrown around behind closed doors. This article is just one framing.
But there's no reason to pin the whole frame of the conversation to the one question for which Twitter corporate chose to publish an answer, unless the only question we are interested in is "did Twitter technically lie" which is the most uninteresting question in this whole situation. If this is the sole context you are using to frame this issue then maybe you should consider if you're following the current news cycle a little too closely.
The idea that there is such a thing as an 'inaccurate definition of active' is silly.
I don't know, that seems more interesting than most questions that could be asked about Twitter.
Why? Twitter is a for profit corporation. If, on the balance, lying serves their interests (I'm sorry, I meant "is consistent with their fiduciary duty to their shareholders") more than edging up to the line without crossing it, that's what they will do.
Even the watchdog organizations such as the FTC and SEC that police the speech of corporations more or less limit themselves to material statements that move markets or influence consumer behavior in ways that can be considered fraudulent. The FTC, FDA, and others are concerned with a fairly narrow reading of consumer harm, the SEC is motivated by the health and trustworthiness of the public market. In any case, there pretty much always has to be some sort of alleged harm. Lying per-se is hardly ever forbidden. So if the advantages of a lie outweigh the (risk adjusted) penalties and reputational risks, that's that.
I agree, that would also be a much more interesting conversation than "did Twitter technically lie."
"Active, as in logs in regularly? Wait, what is 'regularly'? Once a week? Once a month? Every day? Does 'active user' mean, online right now?"
Etc, etc...
Their definition of "active user" is relative, not inaccurate.
The big story in the news last week was "Elon Musk says deal on hold while verifying twitter's 5% Monthly Active Users stat", or something to that effect.
That's the context this article was published in. It is transparently obvious they are re-using the word "active twitter accounts" to cause confusion with the definition of "active" that has been being bandied around. The post is using such a title as a clickbait, to hop aboard a trend.
I think the title, and lack of significant clarification in the article, make it clearly misleading, and I don't think pedantic "well technically active can have multiple definitions" changes the reality of the situation meaningfully.
Let's take both their numbers at face-value and assume they're true.
Twitter has reported: 396.5 million logged-in-this-month users, of which 5% are fake/spam (19.8 million fake users)
This article reported: Looked at 44,058 tweeted-recently accounts, of which 20% are fake (8,800 fake)
Which of those stats looks worse for them?
> The high number of lurkers would make the percentage of fake accounts smaller
Why? Twitter included lurkers in its dataset, this article didn't, why should that impact stats in the direction of fake accounts being smaller?
Because you usually don't create fake accounts to lurk, but to do "something".
I'm speculating, but even when you create bots to boost follower counts you'd probably make them post now and then so as to seem "active".
It makes sense that the proportion of tweeting accounts being bots is much higher than the proportion of lurkers. And since there are also more lurkers in turn than posters, I would say that the real number is much lower than that.
Let's say I own a twitter bot farm. I make 20k accounts, have a system setup that logs into each of them from a unique IP each month at random times to make sure they're not banned yet, and advertise it out. On month 1, someone buys 1000 of them as followers. On month 2, someone buys 1000 of them to tweet spam. etc etc.
Each month, there's 20k active bot accounts (logged in to verify they weren't banned). Only a small number may actually tweet though since buyers may have not gotten them yet. Bot accounts lurk too, for months on end, before ever acting.
I'm not claiming this is accurate, but I am claiming this is a reasonable alternative which doesn't align with the view of bot accounts being more prevalent in tweeting accounts than lurking accounts.
A metric they've artificially inflated by gating tweets, which works to their advantage when calculating spam. With that in mind, I think I'm more inclined to look at spam as a percentage of active tweeters and ignore lurkers.
If you're more interested in Twitter's ecosystem as a whole, it is less interesting.
Nope. ~20% of accounts that tweets are fake. A lurker (aka read-only) is by all meanings an active account.
And since they are trying most probably to get some PR for their company, they use their specific definition of "active Twitter account".
Sure, clickbait headlines are the norm and the devil lurks in the details, but still, many comments have been spent on this, because it's clearly misleading.
~80% of email is spam, it doesn't surprise anyone, because it's so cheap to send spam. Similarly it's easy to create fake accounts and spam, yet it doesn't mean much.
> it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit
> Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users)
As implying that they think accounts that haven't tweeted in the past 90 days don't fit Twitter's mDAU definition. Given the placement of the qualifying phrase, I think that's a reasonable parsing of the sentence, but I see your point that they could be trying to imply their set doesn't fit the definition. If so, that sentence is very badly constructed.
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
The fact that they don't even consider the concept of a non-tweeting lurker to be an mDAU brings their entire analysis into question. Let's face it - Twitter is an emotionally-charged enough place, and tweets have such a way of living forever and being taken out of context, that there are many who use it to consume (and perhaps Like) content but will not tweet publicly. These people are still viewing and engaging with advertisements! Twitter absolutely should consider them monetizable!
But of course, engagement data on lurkers is internal only, and Likes data counts against global API caps: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tweets/lik.... Which means that SparkToro and Followerwonk are incentivized to ignore these users. That they do ignore them, and don't address it anywhere in their methodology, is highly suspect.
But then use your own definition of active and write only a one liner on the difference with no reflection on the impact it might have and no warning on the fact you are answering a different question. Then my conclusion is you want people to make this mistake.
> EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
Made me laugh because you had to add it and made more effort than the author of the article to prevent the confusion :D.
The fact that you had to do this proves the point. Nobody defines "active" the way they have here. The claim is nonsense.
Though personally I think filtering specifically for users that actively send tweets makes sense, since that's really what matters when it comes to measuring how healthy and authentic the discourse is
It seems like everyone is arguing about different metrics and it makes more sense to discuss different, specific measures that might fall into a range of behaviors that are "active" in some sense rather than focusing on which definition of "active" is somehow the best one.
What would be more interesting would be to adapt this and answer several different questions about the proportion of spam among accounts with different metrics of activity to see how things change. For example, does the percentage of spam accounts go down a lot if we lower the bar for "active"? How much & how fast?
Twitter's quarterly earnings define active users thusly:
> Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q1...
I'm pretty sure I've heard a similar definition from Facebook.
This definition supports g-clef's critique that the article picks an unorthodox way to measure active users, resulting in an inflated percentage of accounts being measured as spam/fake accounts, vs what the percentage would be if measured against Twitter's definition of 'active', which includes lurkers.
> “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
Ok, but "consuming the activity on their timeline" is essentially unknowable outside of Twitter, since you can't see what tweets people are viewing. It turns out they're trying to infer this through some other signals like follower count, etc. But you can imagine why that might be sketchy.
Then they constrain the analysis: > A more fair assessment of Mr. Musk’s Twitter following would only include accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days
Let's be real, if you look at a list of Elon tweet replies, they might as well all be spam. Just search @elonmusk and sort by latest. Then compare that to the sorted tweet replies under an actual tweet. IDK how many millions of dollars and man-hours went into the AI that sorted this list, but it seems to just be putting the blue checks at the top and shrugging at the rest. I doubt this three man team is doing any better at spam detection.
I've spent many, many hours lurking on twitter, don't have an account at all, and mostly access it through nitter instances. Are they "biased" for not including me?
edit: should inactive users be counted as active users?
I do wonder about, given perfect knowledge, how the bot accounts would shake up. What percentage produce content (presumably propaganda, automatic tweets using it as an RSS like announcement service, and spam) vs follow people (boost follow accounts, sell likes)?
But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that less 50% of US users tweet five times a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75% as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using survey I believe so should include only active users and no spam/bot.
So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that the 25% less active users might not even post every two month (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back a quarter of the 80% they found as active.
Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example, but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done some good work ;).
Probably picking the sample is still challenging but at least can somewhat tell if the accounts in the sample are genuine.
The method in this article is so flawed that Larry Ellison, founder of a famous law firm, would count as an inactive account since haven't tweeted since 2012[0] and that person apparently looks into investing in Twitter[1]. How can be investing a billion in Twitter when he doesn't use Twitter at all?
[0]https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en
[1]https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-elliso...
This is not their definition, that's what Twitter considers an active account in their revenue reports.
> has no relation
It has some relation, no? I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between how frequently a user sends tweets and how monetizable that user is.
All true. However, do you really believe that a bot is more likely to be active than a real user? If so, fair play to you. If not, then we would expect inactive users to be bots in an even greater proportion than what we see among active users.
I don't see how you can arrive at this conclusion. It depends on who you are following, with some additions by the algorithm (unless you use the chronological feed) and (speculating here) the algo pushes content from real humans.
If you took a random sample of websites you'd find that 99.995% of them are spam. That's why we have to rank search results.
No Twitter, you are not getting my phone number.