The explosive allegations made by former Twitter head of security-turned-whistleblower Peiter Zatko against the microblogging giant could not have come at a better time for Elon Musk, who is currently mired in a legal battle with the company after he agreed to buy out the social media platform and then backed out of the deal.
According to an 83-page confidential disclosure sent to the US Congress and federal agencies last month — accessed by CNN, Time, and The Washington Post — Zatko said he began asking about the prevalence of bot accounts on the platform in early 2021 and was told by Twitter’s head of site integrity that the company was not sure of the number of total bots on its platform.
He alleges that he came away from conversations with the integrity team with the understanding that the company “had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bots,” partly because if the actual number became public, it could harm the company’s value and reputation.
Musk, while backing out of the deal, had cited the “inaccurate number of bots” being disclosed to him as the deal breaker.
While the initial agreement did not mention any bot-related exemptions, Musk claims that the number of bots on any given platform could affect the user experience, and hence could bring down Twitter’s value in the longer run. After Musk stepped back from the deal, Twitter was quick to take the legal route by suing the billionaire, alleging that Musk is using bots as a pretext to get out of the deal, which he now regrets making following the recent market downturn, asking a court to force the deal on him. The case is set to go to trial in October.
Figures like the number of users on a platform are crucial to businesses that have most of their revenue come from advertising, and ad revenue depends on how many people can potentially see an ad. These figures are heavily unreliable throughout the industry due to manipulation and error.
According to the report by CNN, Twitter uses a measurement it calls monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) to report its user numbers to investors and advertisers. Other platforms simply count and report all their active users, a practice Twitter followed until 2019, Zatko alleged, after which it switched to mDAUs as its numbers took major hits following takedowns of major bot networks. With mDAUs, Twitter counts all users that could be shown an advertisement on Twitter — leaving all accounts that for some reason can’t (for instance because they’re known to be bots) in a separate bracket, as per Zatko.
Twitter has stood by the fact that less than five percent of its mDAUs are either fake or spam accounts. But Zatko’s disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of mDAUs, instead of taking it as a percentage of the total number of accounts on the platform, Twitter makes the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service very unclear, which Zatko alleges is deliberately misleading, as per the CNN report.
Zatko’s allegations could back up Musk’s central claim that the number of bots is much higher than Twitter claims.
As per CNN, by going public, Zatko says he believes he is doing the job he was hired to do. “Jack Dorsey reached out and asked me to come and perform a critical task at Twitter. I signed on to do it and believe I’m still performing that mission,” he was quoted in the CNN report.
