Musk Says He Will Carry Out a Random Sampling on 100 Users to Confirm the Number of Spam Bots
Musk was not done tweeting on May 13, however. After tweeting that he was still “committed” to the deal, he declared that he was going to analyze a random sample of 100 users on Twitter and find out how many of them were bots. The billionaire then encouraged his millions of followers to do the same and “see what they discover.”
“Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling,” Musk said on May 13. “I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.” In Twitter’s view, this amounted to a public misrepresentation, especially considering the fact that it had met with Musk before he tweeted and informed him that its “spam estimation process entails daily sampling for a total set of approximately 9,000 accounts per quarter that are manually reviewed.”
