[Analemma_]

People keep trying to explain to you why you're wrong and you keep on ignoring them and persisting with your original false statement.

The 5% number claimed by Twitter is not the percentage of all accounts that are bots. That has never been the claim. Twitter separates its accounts into "mDAU"s and "other", and they are claiming 5% of the mDAUs are bots. You cannot falsify this claim with "bot experiences on Twitter", because all the bots you're seeing could be correctly classified as "other". Indeed, nobody outside Twitter can falsify this claim because it's a statement about Twitter's internal classification. The only thing that can falsify Twitter's claim is their own internal data, so that's why discovery is being done.

[hunterb123]

I'm not talking about all bots. I'm talking about mDAU bots. You guys are trying to argue against a point I'm not making.

3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots, Twitter's is 5%.

Others were defending it by saying "well the number doesn't have to be accurate legally" or "well Musk should have known it's not really accurate".

My counter is that weasel legal wording and logic doesn't give much confidence in Twitter's number at all for FUTURE buyers, advertisers, investors, etc.

They should show their work and prove their number or investors / advertisers / buyers should lower their valuations to reflect somewhere in the middle.

But Twitter hasn't really ever been about the money so the status quo will stay the same.

- edit -

@blitzar: https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twit... you can see their methodology here.

Despite two different mDAU classifications, both of the datasets from SparkToro and Followerwonk were about 20% mDAU bots.

[aw1621107]

> 3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots

Could you provide some sources for these estimates? In particular, I'm curious about the methodology and data sources those third-party sources use.

[hunterb123]

https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twit...

Their methodology is very detailed. Maybe Twitter can post theirs to give more confidence in their 5%.

They used multiple datasets and posted the calculated mDAU for each.

[aw1621107]

Ah, this one. It was discussed on HN back in May [0].

The main problem is that they aren't performing an analysis of mDAUs, as you imply. Their datasets are:

1. Followerwonk Random Sample – "Marc wrote code to randomly select public accounts from Followerwonk’s active database, and passed them to SparkToro for analysis. Casey on our team further scrubbed this list and ran 44,058 public, active accounts through our Fake Followers spam analysis process"

2. Aggregated Average of the Fake Followers Tool - "Over the last 3.5 years of operation, SparkToro’s Fake Followers tool has been run on 501,532 unique accounts, and analyzed thousands of followers for each of those, totaling more than 1 billion profiles (though these are not necessarily unique, and we don’t keep track of which profiles were analyzed as part of that process). ... We’ve included it for comparison, and to show that an analysis that includes simply random Twitter accounts (vs. those that have been recently active) may not be as accurate."

3. All Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter

4. Active Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter

5. Random Sample of 100 Users Following the @Twitter account

The last three datasets are obviously not relevant for getting a good estimate of mDAU authenticity. The second dataset may include inactive/duplicate accounts, and it's not clear how random the account selection is. The first dataset (as well as the second, to some extent) suffers from only including public, active accounts, which very much is not the same population Twitter is working with:

> We define 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.

In particular, note that Twitter has no requirement that mDAUs have public activity.

In addition, the article contains this bit at the bottom, which further reinforces that these numbers aren't comparable:

> We are not disputing Twitter’s claim. There’s no way to know what criteria Twitter uses to identify a “monetizable daily active user” (mDAU) nor how they classify “fake/spam” accounts. We believe our methodology (detailed above) to be the best system available to public researchers. But, internally, Twitter likely has unknowable processes that we cannot replicate with only their public data.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397137

[blitzar]

> 3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots, Twitter's is 5%.

And ... 3rd partys are differentiating a twitter account from a mDAU how? Hint: they are not.