'Deal cannot move forward’ until it proves bot numbers; says Elon Musk

Elon Musk has reiterated his claim that fake and spam accounts account for more than 20% of Twitter's users, saying the acquisition deal "cannot move forward" until Twitter proves the accuracy of its much lower estimate of less than 5%. Musk is currently in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion, which includes its estimated 226 million monetizable daily active users.

"While Twitter claims 20% fake/spam accounts, it could be *much* higher," the Tesla CEO tweeted in response to a report from Teslarati. "My offer was based on the accuracy of Twitter's SEC filings. The CEO of Twitter publicly refused to show proof of 5% yesterday. This deal will not be completed until he does."

Earlier yesterday, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal issued a series of tweets in the midst of the debate over the spam controversy between the company and Musk.

He emphasised that the company is strongly rewarded for detecting and removing as much spam as possible every day.

"Next, spam isn't just 'binary' (human/not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So - they are sophisticated and hard to catch," he tweeted.

He further said that every day, the company suspends over half a million spam accounts, usually before anyone notices them on Twitter.

"The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially - are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous - and cause the most harm to our users - can look totally legitimate on the surface," he added.