Now in Elon Musk's Twitter Drama: Poop Emoji

So this is where we're at now
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted May 17, 2022 1:20 AM CDT
Updated May 17, 2022 5:32 AM CDT
Elon Musk Sends Twitter CEO Poop Emoji
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in Gruenheide, Germany, Tuesday, March 22, 2022.   (Patrick Pleul/Pool via AP, File)

Monday's discourse in the ongoing Elon Musk vs. Twitter saga was not exactly, shall we say, refined. In a tweet reply to the social media company's CEO, Musk simply posted a poop emoji. The thread Musk was responding to involved Parag Agrawal talking about spam accounts, and insisting that the company is "strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong." Agrawal went on to detail why exactly it's so complicated and challenging to fight spam, ending with an explanation as to why it would be impossible for an outside agent to replicate Twitter's internal studies, which consistently find fewer than 5% of accounts are bots. Musk, of course, has recently cited his doubt of that percentage as the reason his takeover of Twitter is on hold.

Musk has said he plans to try to prove Twitter's percentage is wrong, but per Agrawal, "given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share)," it's unlikely anyone outside Twitter could get an accurate picture of spam account percentage. "Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs [monetizable daily active users] on any given day," he added. The Guardian says Musk's emoji response to all that represents "a new low" in the Tesla CEO's relationship with Twitter management. "So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter," Musk tweeted.

Meanwhile, Musk told the audience at a summit in Miami that it wouldn't be "out of the question" for him to reduce his $54.20-per-share offer to buy Twitter: "I’m still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter. And Twitter is refusing to tell us. This seems like a strange thing," he said. It remains unclear whether Musk can lower his bid without being subject to a $1 billion "break fee." The AP reports that another issue adding "complexity" to Musk's bid is his ties to China; there are concerns China could use those ties as leverage to pressure Twitter to ease up on its rules against propaganda and/or muzzle human rights activists on the platform. (More Elon Musk stories.)

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