Twitter says it removes 1 million spam accounts a day

Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts each day in a call with executives Thursday during a briefing that aimed to shed more light on the company’s fake and bot accounts as it tussles with Elon Musk over “spam bots.” The Tesla CEO, who has offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, has threatened to walk away from the deal if the company can’t show that less than 5% of its daily active users are automated spam accounts.

Musk has argued, without presenting evidence, that Twitter has significantly underestimated the number of these “spam bots” — automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation — on its service.Twitter said on the call that the spam accounts represent well below 5% of its active user base each quarter. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter said it reviews “thousands of accounts” sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active, to determine whether an account is real.