Elon Musk has claimed that he has been accused of breaching a non-disclosure agreement by the Twitter legal team. Musk revealed in a tweet on Saturday:
“Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!”
This comes after it was announced on Friday that the $44 billion deal for Musk to purchase Twitter was “temporarily put on hold” whilst data was collected on how many fake accounts the social media platform has.
Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!
This actually happened.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
To identify the proportion of bots, Musk’s team were set to test “a random sample of 100 followers”. He even “encouraged” his followers to do the same tests to see what they find. In response to a user asking for more information on why they chose this sample size and how they did the test, Musk said:
“I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”
Elon, can you elaborate a bit on the "process"? So that we as Twitter can help you in finding out the real percentage of scam/spam/bot accounts
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) May 14, 2022
Musk has since revealed what their shocking findings were, saying:
“There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users.”
Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling.
I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022