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Now, Twitter questioned by SEC on spam account claims

Twitter makes its estimates of false accounts with an internal review

INDIA-TWITTER/

Amid a legal battle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter is being questioned by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the methodology used in calculating “false or spam account”. The same methodology had come under the spotlight when Musk pulled out of the Twitter acquisition deal, questioning the company’s way of quantifying the number of bots in the system.

Twitter-representing law firm Wilson Sonsini replied in a June 22 letter saying the company believes it adequately disclosed the methodology in its annual report filed for 2021. The letter says that Twitter makes its estimates of false accounts with an internal review of sample accounts. The number of fake accounts "represent the average false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during a quarter," the letter said. It added that fewer than five per cent of Twitter's “Monetisable Daily Active Usage or Users,” or mDAU, were fake accounts in the fourth quarter of last year, the period that the SEC had questioned.

The letter was disclosed in a filing posted by the SEC on Wednesday, a day after Twitter's former head of security alleged that the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defences and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread disinformation.

Twitter said that the review of fake accounts is done manually by humans who check thousands of them. The accounts are chosen randomly, and the employees use a complex set of rules “that define spam and platform manipulation.” An account is deemed to be false if it violates one or more of the rules, the letter said. The fake accounts go through a multi-step review and are investigated by multiple trained employees, it said.

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