'Bots are angry...': Elon Musk announces ‘random sampling’ of Twitter's followers after putting deal on hold

Twitter, on its own platform, is followed by nearly 62 million handles.

Published on: May 14, 2022, 08:10:24 IST

By HT News Desk, New Delhi

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In continuation of his announcement from a day ago that the Twitter acquisition deal was being put on hold temporarily, world's richest person Elon Musk announced on Saturday his team will do ‘random sampling’ of 100 followers of Twitter's account on the social media giant's own platform.

FILE PHOTO: Founder and CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk. (REUTERS)

Also Read | Elon Musk says on Twitter deal on hold, adds a ‘committed to’ tweet hours later

“To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover…,” Musk, who has nearly 93 million followers, informed.

“The bots are very angry at being counted,” he added.

Meanwhile, the sampling, will, presumably, be done to estimate the percentage of spam or fake accounts out of the total 61.7 million accounts that follow Twitter. On Friday, Musk put his acquisition of Twitter on hold citing a Reuters report that said that according to the company's own calculations, false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 per cent of of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter.

The report further said that the networking site, during this period, had 229 million users who were served advertising.

Friday's bombshell by Musk--who announced late last month that he reached an agreement with Twitter to purchase it for USD 44 billion--came days after the South African born entrepreneur said one of his priorities would be to remove ‘spam bots’ from the platform.

Also Read | Twitter CEO after Elon Musk bombshell: 'No one working just to keep lights on'

Also, hours after putting the deal on hold, the 50-year-old said in a post he was still committed to the acquisition.

(With Reuters inputs)

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