ELON Musk has added fuel to the fire of his ongoing ‘bot’ dispute with Twitter.
The billionaire just posted a tweet that’s sparked more debate online about whether Twitter is telling the truth about how many of its users are actually fake.
Musk tweeted: “Twitter claims that >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. Does anyone have that experience?”
He then added a poll to the tweet and gave users less than 24 hours to reply to two options.
The options are two crying laughing faces or “Who me!?” followed by a robot emoji.
Both poll answers show that Musk clearly isn’t taking Twitter’s claims at face value.
The tweet seems to have got the attention of self proclaimed “hacktivist” group Anonymous.
The hacking group tweeted: “Elon is the bot.”
In earlier tweets, the billionaire Tesla boss said his $44billion purchase “cannot move forward” until CEO Parag Agrawal provides “proof” that fewer than five per cent of accounts are fake.
Musk, 50, has publicly sparred with Agrawal over the number of bot accounts on the platform.
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He has said that he believes they are higher than Twitter’s official figures indicate.
It follows Musk’s revelation last week that his purchase of Twitter is “temporarily on hold” while he seeks more detail about fake accounts.
He later clarified that he is “still committed to the acquisition”.
The price of the company’s shares tumbled amid the confusion.
Just yesterday, Musk sent Agrawal a poo emoji in response to the Twitter CEO trying to clarify the bot rumors.
He explained how Twitter tries to tackles bots and has to “lock” millions of accounts.
He said that analysis has found that fake profiles make up “well under” 5% of Twitter users and claims external analysis of the figures wouldn’t be possible.
The Twitter CEO concluded: “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.”
It was this statement that Musk responded to with the smiling poo emoji and nothing more.
Musk is now calling for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to evaluate Twitter user numbers.
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