Earlier today Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” He also said, “still committed to acquisition.”
While tech stocks have been collapsing over the past 15 days, from a big picture perspective this approach by Musk looks like a potential negotiation strategy to lower the offer. The actual number of spam/bot accounts on the platform is unknown.
CNBC – […] Twitter shares fell more than 8% Friday and are down about 23% from Musk’s agreed-upon purchase price of $54.20 per share. Part of the dip is related to an overall slump in technology stocks this month. The Nasdaq has fallen another 11% since the market close on April 25, the day Twitter accepted Musk’s offer.
“This is probably a negotiation tactic on behalf of Elon,” Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein senior research analyst, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “The market has come down a lot. He’s probably using the guise of true active users as a negotiation ploy.”
Musk may feel some pressure or obligation to other potential investors in Twitter to lower the price, even if the world’s wealthiest man is more price agnostic.
Musk is in talks with outside investors for both equity and preferred financing to lessen his personal stake in Twitter. If he can get a lower price for Twitter, the returns could be higher for outside investors if and when Twitter returns to public ownership or is resold. (read more)
Suspicious Cat remains, well, suspicious…
Steve Bannon called this weeks ago. He said musk should pull out his offer, watch it’s stock continue to plummet then come back in after all the board members have been fired for not fulfilling their feduciary responsibilities to investors. He can then nab twitter for an even better price. Sounds like Elon watches warroom! 😂
no doubt about it that the final transaction is going to be a real historically important inflection point.
Elon is not wasting any time exposing the exist twitter and using that to former leverage for better terms.
reminder: behind elon are NOW 19 private investor who are aiming to make this the most celerbrated and successful acquisition of the past twenty years. They really want to make a big pile of money. I don’t have issue with that. The “old” twitter ceases to exist and that is priceless. The transformation is crucial to transferring power. And by the looks of it, the power will be restored back to where it belongs…to real people, not bots, not algorithms who have something to say and to be heard.
God Bless Americna
Bannon is a sack of hell!! Love listening to him. Brilliant, and passionate about destroying the vermin behind the ruin of our country.
I would bet that the 5% number is hedged as in “ best good faith estimate “ , “ impossible to make a truly accurate determination “ blah , blah etc but probably everyone in the know , knows bots way north of 5% , how far north , perhaps no one really knows ? hence President Trump’s “ truthed” , he knows value and he knows when something is dicey and not worth the value being assigned to it . IMHO
its does not mater what the number is..the problem with twitter is that they used 5%
They came up with the number…And now that they did, they clearly know who the bots are and will continue to do nothing about it.
I was removed from twitter last week because I said “this guy should be slapped like an Italian baker who’s madly buttering a 12 ft loaf of italic bred”
Someone sure found me…and they sure as hell can find 5% of the bots…they have all been reported numerous times… you know it
opens up a whole can of worms for them
I would have lots of semantic questions.
Define bot
Is a bot an artificial intelligence self directed program.?
Is a bot my 100 avatar accounts which will all state. The same thing on 10000 sites?
How many bots does Twitter control directly and through contract and how many tweets do they produce.
Assuming 5% bots how many tweets can a single bot generate in a day?
The correct question is what percentage of tweets are original human product…..
I would add the following “what percentage of tweets are original human product from a unique contributor – i.e. not having the same person counted twice”
That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Right?
Similar to voting, right?
And also how many human tweets are financially paid to be trolls or targeted influence?
What about Pierre Delecto?
Was he a bot or was he not?
As I understood the situation, Pierre Delecto was a Twitter handle which Mitt Romney created in order to cheer himself up when he said something as Mitt Romney, to kind of get the rah-rah-rah factor going and make it look like there was a a real groundswell of support for the things that Mitt Romney was saying . . .
people would pick up on what Pierre Delecto said and in turn would share that with their friends, co-workers and anyone else they happened to have a conversation about the same things that mattered so much to them AND Mitt . . . and say, that Pierre Delecto said just what I was thinking to myself!
The made up Pierre Delecto was created for the purpose of influencing and shaping opinion and it made Mitt feel good, too and nostalgic as he thought about his times in France, wearing a beret, stopping in at the Boulangerie. Someone so sophisticated and cultured like Pierre Delecto!
Who knows!
But I think he is also a bot, not one of thousands created to put in their two cents in support of a particular viewpoint being promoted with the help of Twitter, but more of a one-off bot, created exclusively for Mitt Romney.
Wonder if the bot origination-source(s) can be traced? 🧐
“Pierre Delecto” . . .
Delecto is a “dupe” account. Not a bot. Not many people are grasping. It’s 5% bots, the next question should be how many dupes with accounts logged to the same ISP number.
Hahaha good one! 🤣🤣🤣
Uh, if the firm can ONLY estimate its real vs. fake followers, then it stands to reason that there will be a class action suit regarding reported circulation for setting advertising rates. Misrepping that would be fraud.
Shadow-banning and censorship also cheat advertisers, not to mention users.
As long as it causes the Leftist crazies at TWTR angst, fine with me.
The leftards are trying to jackpot the price on the market to thwart his purchase. He is countering to reveal the bloated user data. A boat load of accounts are bots and trolls.
bots and trolls and dupes as Bshaw has enlightened me – Pierre Delecto is a dupe –
what would be quite amusing would be if a Twitter whistleblower would come forward on the issue of bots – trolls – and dupes – and tell us how that all worked – also, if a nice helpful Twitter person helped Mitt in the creation of Pierre Delecto – did someone from Twitter help him set that up – or maybe someone in his office set that up for him – I know he has a lot of education but he seems so dense, actually.
Pierre Delecto . . . sheesh, the first person I thought of was Carlos Danger!
Bshaw7369610
May 13, 2022 8:29 pm
Reply to suejeanne
Delecto is a “dupe” account. Not a bot. Not many people are grasping. It’s 5% bots, the next question should be how many dupes with accounts logged to the same ISP number.
He might find out the truth, I doubt it, but either way WE will never get the real % ….
I’m guessing 75% B S accounts.
“He’s probably using the guise of true active users as a negotiation ploy.”
Renegotiation following the discovery of fraudulent representation of assets by the seller is not a ‘ploy’.
My favorite hat… here’s hoping it becomes Twitter’s fate:
This guy is not a big Elon fan:
Our Fren Elon – The Good Citizen (substack.com)
It’s an impressive collection of derogatory info about Elon. Would love to see someone actually fact check it to see if each of the claims is historically accurate and not taken out of context. I plan to do that but it will have to wait until I finish a couple other tasks in progress.
Elon’s strategy may also be an attempt to uncover more dishonesty on the part of the Dark Side current owners of Twitter — exposing their tendency to inflate numbers. His timing, however, is shrewd — uncover the dishonesty after the sale is in his power to take or leave, but BEFORE the price is paid. Investors will have more confidence in the face value honesty of the new company.
An explanation of Twitter’s bot problem for @vivafrei et al
I’m not really writing for National File anymore and I don’t get much visibility on Twitter so everybody on this Locals forum is in for a little treat: the dark truth about the Internet that nobody in media wants to tell you.
Namely, that roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the Internet is a scam. And it appears that some people are ready to expose Twitter’s part in that scam just to ruin Elon’s investment.
About 7-8 years ago I worked for a tech security company called White Ops (they’re called HUMAN now after a rebrand). They were pioneering an innovative anti-bot technology using a hacker technique called Side-Channel Analysis – which basically involved looking at the identifying data of entities on the internet to see if they made sense for real human users.
There were over 1,000 points of data they looked at, ranging from “Why is a smartphone running a desktop operating system it isn’t compatible with and a browser that’s 10 years old?” to “Why is the triangulated response time more consistent with a device in Indonesia than rural Alabama?”
The upshot is that SCA was much more reliable way of identifying bots than the traditional method: looking at the user’s behavior and using a statistical model to identify how “human” they looked. The problem with modeling is that, over time, bot hackers got so good at gaming the models that the really exceptional bots looked more “human” than actual humans.
Sophisticated bots build networks of follows and likes and interests… realistically drag cursors over screens like a real human… visit websites to build up cookie profiles… and even fill up shopping carts, then leave them like absentminded shoppers! And, of course, bots infecting a real human’s machine could just impersonate that real human.
So White Ops ran a study with 36 major advertisers – who were running their own existing anti-bot tech already – which found that roughly a third of their entire digital advertising budgets were being spent on “nonhuman traffic”.
If this held true industry-wide, that would mean $7.2 billion in annual advertising bot fraud was the single biggest tech scam on the entire planet – putting it in the same league in money terms as the international drug trade, far beyond ransomware and bank fraud. And the problem was likely much worse, since smaller advertisers didn’t have the benefit of existing anti-bot tech that the big players had.
Though to be fair, only a small fraction of the profits would make it directly to the scammers. The actual fraud was usually fairly deep in a “long tail” of the advertising supply chain, hidden in a arbitrage mess of shell companies and third-party “traffic sourcers” – often leading back to organized crime in Russia and East Asia.
But the problem was systemic. Advertising platforms like Twitter didn’t want to admit that up to 1/3 of their eyeballs were fake. Advertising agencies didn’t want to admit that 1/3 of their services were fake. Advertising executives at big companies didn’t want to admit that 1/3 of their budgets were going into a black hole of fraud. And all of these people had serious financial incentives to keep their heads in the sand.
Everybody kind of “knew” there was a major problem but, as long as there wasn’t hard proof, people could just go along with the flood of funny money and hope that nobody noticed. Kind of like the run-up to the real estate crash of 2008, but with even less transparency. It helped that everyone involved could just express confusion about the implications of the technology and shift responsibility to someone else.
It was my job as a junior salesman to talk to these people to convince them to explore using anti-bot tech that actually worked.
And – surprise surprise – very few major advertising execs were interested in finding the answers to these questions. Ad agencies were virulently uninterested, but lied through their teeth about how they were very interested in spending months and years “considering” it. I made connections with quite a number of them, but – though those convos were way above my pay grade so I wouldn’t know – I understand there was no interest at all from Big Tech companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook (who claimed to be taking their own similar approach to the problem internally).
If Twitter has more than 5% bots on their platform, that’s a serious problem.
If Twitter has more than 25% bots on their platform and internal documents prove that they KNEW about it, but LIED to their advertisers…
That would be a titanic disaster. Even with the status-quo estimate of Twitter’s bottiness, it’s not worth $44 billion on paper. If the company becomes a poster child for advertising fraud, then their ad revenue will go right into the toilet.
If actual fraud is proven (which anti-Elon poison pillers would be happy to document if they could), that could put Elon on the hook for staggering civil (and possibly even criminal?) liability for years of malfeasance. Y’all are actual lawyers, so you’d know better than me.
This is why it made sense for Twitter’s board and management to agree to a $1 billion breakup clause with Elon: they knew they were selling him a lemon and, as long as nobody recognized that fact, they could sell it for far more than it was worth.
And that meant Elon would have 1 billion reasons not to back out once he got a close look at how funny Twitter’s money is.
It seems like somebody is threatening to air all that dirty laundry now, which is why it makes sense for Elon to put the entire thing on hold.
https://locals.com/member/AJCooke?community_id=11169
really interesting, tyshab – thank you for taking the time to write this!
fraud?
Musk raises the issue at an appropriate time. If the investor community has been deceived by knowing false statements, ….
POTUS putting out some interesting comments on Twitter and Elon
on Truth Social. Said that why would anyone buy it for that
ridculous price, that we should know the number of
bot and fake accounts that past , present and future stockholder
should know.. Again said he has no interest in returning to
Twitter.
Elon is not stupid. He has people who would know the reality of the twitter business down to solid details.
I would say elon is handling the acquisition smartly. If the bots and fake numbers exceed the 5 percent or even any amount, this gives him more leverage with the final transactions.
But we KNOW what is true about twitter. Not only are there bots, but these other fake accounts are PART OF THE SO-CALLED algorithm. It’s actually part of the network. This is how the CIA does it, with their contractors. The algorithm isn’t merely some method to locate and identify the evaluate claims and comments and links, but also a defensive AND offensive capability that DRIVES narratives and also presenting “counter” information and often preemptive and distracting content.
This is all done by AI ..plus a team of around 1900 people. give or take, They work around the clock, BOTH detecting wrong think but also advances for maximum impact preemptive narratives window dressing provided by the deep dark main stream maniacs. Most of these targeted programmes are not only made for domestic US target users, but also a the global twitter, which is much much much more than just people twittering between each other. This is the reason why elon wants to own it. The potential is incredible. He can optimize it and also restore it to a more broadly used and accepted platform for any discussion.
By eliciting awareness that these dark energy spam and bot and algorithm based “technologies” exist, he can use this for two reasons:
we all benefit from these not so subtle battles that elon has decided to engage.
He has a quote that I find very interesting:
I like interesting projects. Money isn’t a priority. (driven by passion to create something different and powerful/effective).
God Bless America
Brilliant – destroyed Twitter in record time and got Netflix to stand-down on its woke agenda.
May lose his deposit but no one else stepped up to the line to save Free Speech for All.
Thank you Elon Musk!
Sunshine is the best disinfectant…
Lets all have a look, shall we?
I might be willing to bet that Elon had this plan all ready to gop from the very beginning !
Put the Deep State Twitter out of business and Help POTUS Trump’s Truth Social all at the same time !
I am betting Twitter had a bout 35% Fake Bots !
Based on some very detailed and somewhat interesting comments above, 1/3 “fake” accounts, bots, no human and probably doesn’t even capture those human accounts where one person/IP has 20 accounts.
Twitter is fiction. Next!
Note that fraud is NOT covered by the Directors & Officers Insurance policy. So when stockholders sue the Twitter Directors for fraudulent representation of user numbers, they each are personally exposed. This creates yet another opportunity for Elon to negotiate.
I was kicked off of Twitter years ago. I can’t delete my account until I “get out of jail”, and I refuse to bend to their silly rules. Therefore my account sits there, abandoned, but looking like an actual user when I haven’t used it in years. I wonder how many other accounts like mine are being represented as actual users by Twitter for advertising/revenue purposes.