Opinion | Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter - The New York Times

The man loves Twitter. He tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the fail whale.

Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and former chief executive, always wanted it to be something else. Something it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. “The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation,” he said in 2018. Twitter began “ measuring conversational health” and trying to tweak the platform to burnish it. Sincere as the effort was, it was like those liquor ads advising moderation. You don’t get people to drink less by selling them whiskey.

The Real History of Twitter, in Brief

Twitter began as an idea that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ( @Jack) had in 2006. Dorsey had originally imagined Twitter as an SMS-based communications platform. Groups of friends could keep tabs on what each other were doing based on their status updates. Like texting, but not.

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022

Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022

For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022

Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.

Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2022

Twitter algorithm should be open source

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022

Most of these “top” accounts tweet rarely and post very little content.

Is Twitter dying? https://t.co/lj9rRXfDHE

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2022

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.

What should be done? https://t.co/aPS9ycji37

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store pic.twitter.com/RxawVUAYKH

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022

The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022

Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen 🙏

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2021

in case u need to lose a boner fast pic.twitter.com/fcHiaXKCJi

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2022

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

— jack (@jack) April 26, 2022

There is so much potential with Twitter to be the most trusted & broadly inclusive forum in the world!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 3, 2022

Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022

This one blows my mind.

It will go into textbooks for corporate communication failure, at least at business schools.

Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Next, spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So – they are sophisticated and hard to catch.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Some final context: fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work! You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Each human review is based on Twitter rules that define spam and platform manipulation, and uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

The use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real. FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes we often see multiple indicators that it’s a real person.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

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.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022

💩

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022

So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022