This study is a great example of how you can use the data you have available to talk yourself into your conclusions. The implicit point of the study is to refute the "5% of Twitter accounts are spam" stat from Twitter's 10-Q that was the basis of his putting the twitter acquisition "on hold".
Except - the baseline that they choose is entirely NOT comparable to that of Twitter's baseline. The study says:
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
Except that we know what Twitter defines as a monetizable DAU:
> We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
Nothing about posting, nothing about engagement at all - simply: were you able to see an ad?
So there isn't any reason to claim that this "might" represent what Twitter uses as an mDAU - we know, in fact, that is not how they measure it. A more honest statement would have been:
"We selected a random sample of (etc. etc.). We believe that this sample is large enough to be significantly significant, however, it can not be compared to Twitter's mDAU set, as it does not count passive consumers of Twitter content. Instead, this data can be used to suggest that a significant amount of the total posted content on Twitter is delivered by bots"
My guess is the number of consumers of content is greater than the posters of content by several orders of magnitude, though some of that would be mitigated by the longer time horizon.
The whole thing is BS. Twitter could have easily got an accurate number if they wanted to. And Elon could have forced them to do that as part of the deal or done a decent job on his own before the offer.
Both sides are bullshitting to negotiate a better price.
"We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the third quarter of 2020 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter"
I think that Twitter actively does not want spambots on their site and therefore would invest into metrics so they know how they're performing on that.
"both sides are bullshitting to get a better price"
Which implies that this number is related to Twitter trying to get a better price. However, if this is the number they have always said, regardless of the methodology, clearly they can't be trying to get a better price - as they started doing this long before there was a price to make better.
That is separate and independent from whether the number is accurate to begin with - if it's remained consistent and publicly available, there's no chicanery here, the risk around that stat has always been baked into the market price of the company.
The percentage of fake users has a high correlation with the value of the business. Twitter's value is higher if the number is lower. I'm not suggesting they just started bullshitting in the past month, just that they are not making the best effort to get an accurate number.
Having zero bots would be good, but obviously that isn't True. So instead they say a low consistent number and hope no one proves them wrong. Most importantly it doesn't appear to be getting worse.
"Are you challenging Twitter’s earnings report, saying that <5% of mDAUs are fake/spam?
We are not disputing Twitter’s claim. There’s no way to know what criteria Twitter uses to identify a “monetizable daily active user” (mDAU) nor how they classify “fake/spam” accounts. We believe our methodology (detailed above) to be the best system available to public researchers. But, internally, Twitter likely has unknowable processes that we cannot replicate with only their public data."
Except - the baseline that they choose is entirely NOT comparable to that of Twitter's baseline. The study says:
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
Except that we know what Twitter defines as a monetizable DAU:
> We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
Nothing about posting, nothing about engagement at all - simply: were you able to see an ad?
So there isn't any reason to claim that this "might" represent what Twitter uses as an mDAU - we know, in fact, that is not how they measure it. A more honest statement would have been:
"We selected a random sample of (etc. etc.). We believe that this sample is large enough to be significantly significant, however, it can not be compared to Twitter's mDAU set, as it does not count passive consumers of Twitter content. Instead, this data can be used to suggest that a significant amount of the total posted content on Twitter is delivered by bots"
My guess is the number of consumers of content is greater than the posters of content by several orders of magnitude, though some of that would be mitigated by the longer time horizon.