Elon Musk said his team is going to do a 'random sample of 100 followers' of Twitter to see how many of the platform's users are actually bots
Elon Musk on Friday said he plans to conduct his own research to determine the amount of Twitter users that are actually bots before his purchase of the social media company continues.
In a tweet sent early Friday morning, Musk said the Twitter deal was on hold until he could verify the site's estimate that fake or spam accounts represent less than 5% of users, though he added he was "still committed" to the acquisition.
"To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter," Musk said in a tweet, referring to the platform's own account, which has more than 61 million followers. "I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover."
Twitter announced on April 25 it accepted Musk's buyout offer. A week later, Twitter said in a public filing that fake or spam accounts made up less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the first quarter.
When a Twitter user questioned if Musk had thought about this before agreeing to a $44 billion deal, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said he "relied upon the accuracy of Twitter's public filings."
