[j4pe]

Parag apparently lost his patience with superficial and misleading claims about Twitter spam (like this analysis) and posted about it today.

You can see it here (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576).

Noteworthy highlights:

* Twitter estimates its <5% number from human analysis of multi-thousand user random samplings of mDAU

* Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences

* Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis

* Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data

Having just finished building a Twitter analysis tool, I agree with Parag that the Twitter API doesn't provide sufficient clarity to make decisions about spam. This article's analysis doesn't hold up - just because you can name several features you're going to use to generate a spam confidence score about an account does not mean that spam confidence score will have any precision.

[wonderwonder]

Musk responded to Parag's thread with a poop emoji. Not going to lie if I worked at twitter I would be a little nervous about my career at this point. For several reasons including what appears to be the potential for a very hostile work culture in the near term. Musk is being openly antagonistic towards twitter leadership and denigrating the people that work there. Although it does seem more and more like the deal is not going to close. I don't think Musk wants it anymore and is seizing on anything to get out of it.

[ryzvonusef]

> Musk is being openly antagonistic towards twitter leadership and denigrating the people that work there.

Seeing how badly twitter has been managed, (for a laugh, check out their "R&D" expenditure), how mush of a loss making enterprise it has been, and how it always at risk of a take over, is it that surprising?

If it has been Elliot Management (the previous rumored takeover threat for twitter) a group far less prone to public display than Musk... would things have been any less different? The only difference is that Musk is being open about what he has been doing, which I see a public good, frankly.

Elliot's track record shows it is far more vicious in layoffs of cuts.

----

https://fortune.com/2013/10/25/why-is-twitter-spending-so-mu...

https://www.rndtoday.co.uk/latest-news/is-twitters-rd-provid...

https://www.axios.com/2021/11/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-departu...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevindowd/2022/02/27/wall-stree...

[diob]

I don't think he wanted it in the first place. This is all performative bs for him to make another quick buck / get pr.

[mlindner]

This type of argument needs to die. He has never done anything "to make a quick buck" so the use of "another" here implies facts that are utterly false. Musk has no history of "pumping and dumping" what so ever.

[plausibledeny]

How is Elon going to make a quick buck from a failed deal? If anything he'll have to pay out significantly.

[pavlov]

He got an excuse to sell lots of Tesla stock at a price 40% higher than today. Selling the stock without this charade would have sent a negative message about how little he believes in Tesla’s stock price and sunk the price further.

Even accounting for the breakup fee he comes ahead financially by many billions in cash, while also building his image as the free speech edgelord. Win-win.

[plausibledeny]

He just sold $16 billion worth of Tesla stock in Nov/Dec 2021, why would he need a fake excuse to sell another $8 billion in April 2022?

[ahahahahah]

Your logic is terrible. Your argument would only make sense if he didn't have an excuse for the previous sale, but he did.

[camjw]

I remember reading on here that the breakup fee is only applicable in very narrow cases, basically only if the US govt blocks the deal. If it's not applicable then he's on the hook for the whole ~40billy. Does he still come out ahead financially in that case if, for instance, the Twitter board take him to court? Genuine question.

[pavlov]

Would they really go to court? That could take years and create a cloud of uncertainty around Twitter — certainly not good for shareholder value.

It's much easier for the board if they settle privately with Musk: "Yeah, pay the breakup fee and we'll forget this ever happened."

[ProjectArcturis]

Read Matt Levine's Money Stuff column from the past couple days -- it explains realistically what could happen.

[mandeepj]

> He got an excuse to sell lots of Tesla stock at a price 40% higher than today.

Ironically, Twitter deal plus related announcements hammered the stock more than the overall market downturn. Besides that, I believe no one wants this deal to go through including US government. Earlier, The board could not legally decline the deal

[minsc_and_boo]

Musk has a history of making public, bad-faith declarations to pump assets he later sells at profit.

More than one person has pointed out that Musk likely wanted to sell his Twitter stock, and was using the official-looking, low-ball buy offer to pump it. Twitter board smartly called his bluff, and now Musk is trying to weasel his way out of paying anything.

[gzer0]

> Musk has a history of making public, bad-faith declarations to pump assets he later sells at profit.

Could you point me to those instances?

His offer wasn't a lowball offer at all considering the tech stock bloodbath we have seen as of late, and especially so because the offer was made just right before the massive downturn we have witnessed. I think it's quite the contrary; 44 billion is way higher than its worth imo.

> Musk is trying to weasel his way out of paying anything.

He would need to pay a $1 billion break up fee. I don't understand what point you are trying to make here.

[minsc_and_boo]

The Twitter offer came before the stock market drop, making it both a low-ball offer and making the Twitter board smart to call his bluff.

Musk only needs to pay the $1B breakup fee if he can't procure enough financing, among other strings. Musk has definitely has enough financing, he just doesn't want to pay it, so he's trying to weasel out of it by laying the ground work for a settlement to walk away.

Either way, Twitter's board is getting Musk's money, either selling at a now-premium or settling for wanting to break, due to Musk's errors.

[jen20]

> Could you point me to those instances?

Here's one [1].

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/the-sec-wants-tesla-to-exp...

[blitzar]

> His offer wasn't a lowball offer at all considering the tech stock bloodbath we have seen as of late

The real bloodbath came after he bought it, at the time it was a modest premium.

> He would need to pay a $1 billion break up fee.

He is laying out the case at the moment to walk away and pay no break up fee.

[mlindner]

> Musk has a history of making public, bad-faith declarations to pump assets he later sells at profit.

No he does not. He has no history of that what so ever.

[Ancalagon]

Wasn’t Bitcoin one of these?

[stjohnswarts]

The PR is priceless.

[thewebcount]

> * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences

This doesn't pass the smell test in my opinion. Given that everyone who tries to create an account without a phone number has to go through the friction of getting their account locked immediately, they clearly don't care about this sort of friction. Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a tweet which has been discussed at length on HN before.

[thecleaner]

The difference is between posting a tweet everytime and going through the friction once. That's what he's talking about. You are comparing different things.

[throwmeawayy]

I have a Twitter account with > 10k followers that is a few years old. Created without a phone number, and of course, immediately locked. Somehow, managed get it unlocked and still going on a few years later without a phone number. Though, I'm always in fear of the ban hammer.

[google234123]

How about you add a phone number if you are living in constant fear?

[shapefrog]

> Given that everyone who tries to create an account without a phone number has to go through the friction

Yes

> Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a tweet which has been discussed at length on HN before.

Yes

Now imagine filling out 3 captchas every time you open the twitter app on your phone, 1 for ever time you tweet and 1 for every person you follow.

Most users of twitter, use either an app on their phone or the cookies in their browser suffer the friction of forgetting their password (likely password1 btw) because they have to log in so infrequently.

[ASalazarMX]

Also, bot networks are so kind as to label themselves with the same hashtag, I don't understand why Twitter doesn't analyze trending topics to detect bots. There's always dormant accounts with thousands of followed/followers who start the propaganda.

[ramblerman]

But we were talking about bots. You and Parag are shifting the dialogue to spam

> 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's not talking about detecting bots. I.e. fake and automated accounts. He's talking about twitter users/bots that cause what they perceive to be harmful content. Which is a very different thing, and was the whole point of Musk's intended involvement in the first place.

[8note]

And? Only advertisers see the harm from bots - being charged for bot impressions.

Outside of that, bots cause the same problems that real people do, making twitter a place people don't want to spend time on/view ads on.

The advertisers need both bad groups removed

[StanislavPetrov]

>* Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis

>* Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data

"I have secret information so trust me" is an excellent reason to reject an assertion every time, whether it is made by an individual, a corporation, or a government. It doesn't mean it isn't true, but it means that absolutely nobody should put any credence in the assertion at all.

[seydor]

It makes sense. The bots are just loud and tend to all follow the most famous people, so their numbers look larger when people look there

[bobsmooth]

I think Elon's response reflects what a lot of us are thinking about the "<5%" number.

[alaricus]

> Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data

That's convenient isn't it?

This report made headlines because it aligns with everyone's experience with Twitter: almost everyone on Twitter is either a bot or a corporate managed account.

[ryan_lane]

That doesn't align with my experience. The vast majority of what I see in my feed is real people. I do know, however, that if I look at the replies to any viral tweet that a large percentage of them will be through fake accounts.

[dang]

Related thread:

Twitter CEO: “Let’s talk about spam, with the benefit of data, context” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 - May 2022 (13 comments)

[c7DJTLrn]

>Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data

Riiiight, and Craig Wright claims to have proof of being Satoshi Nakamoto but won't show anybody.

I don't know how good of a CEO Parag is, but he's not a very good bullshitter.

[modeless]

"But you don't know which ones we count as mDAUs" and "accounts that look like spam are actually real" are not as good a defense as he thinks. The product is still affected by spam and fraud even if it's excluded from advertising metrics, and accounts that look like spam are not good for the product either even if they happen to be real people for whatever reason.

[christkv]

If they believe the claim to be false they can open the data they used to calculate the 5% so it can be verified by a third party.

[berkut]

So you want them to publicly list / make download-able any phone numbers of the people in that 5%, and their full names and email addresses?

[ahahahahah]

Absolutely not. No social media company should take a set of user's private data and "open the data" (especially just because some blowhard is trying to find any reason to back out of a deal). Even without the "open" bit, they shouldn't be providing that data to a third party.