Elon Musk responds with poop emoji to Twitter CEO amid argument over spam

New Delhi: Elon Musk has sent an insulting emoji to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal as part of his fight against spam.

Last week, Musk announced that his proposed takeover of Twitter was “on hold” as he looked for more information about spam, bots and fake accounts on the platform.

Musk suggested that he did not believe Twitter’s own estimate that less than 5 per cent of the active accounts on its platform were automated or spam accounts.

Since then, both parties have been largely quiet on the issue, leading to speculation that Musk could be looking for a way out of the deal.

Now, Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal has published a long thread in which he said he would take on the issue “with the benefit of data, facts, and context”.

Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

In the thread, he said that Twitter estimated that the number of fake accounts was actually “well under” 5 per cent. But he also said that only Twitter could provide that estimate, because it relied on private information that Twitter was unable to share.

That prompted Musk to send the turd emoji, presumably in disbelief at Agrawal’s claims.

In a follow-up post, Musk pressed Agrawal for further information about how many real and active accounts were present on the platform.

“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter,” he wrote.