Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

* "There's a good argument for Elon Musk's side of the case out there, floating between Earth and Venus if only you'd look at it".

* "Oh, I'm not an astronomer, you shouldn't expect me to point out this teapot to you or tell you where it is".

Okaaaaaaaay. But that's not how discussions work in practice. I put forth the best arguments I'm aware of, and you put for the best arguments you've thought of, then we both evaluate the evidence for ourselves. That's... normally how discussions work.

If you're not interested in the legal minutia, then you don't have to discuss them with me? I'm not saying I'm a perfectly good lawyer myself (indeed, I'm an engineer). But there's value in the struggle to understand these things, even things outside of my field.

----------

The legal arguments for this case so far, are actually really simple. You don't need to be a lawyer to understand:

1. That the Court of Delaware has been chosen.

2. That the judge (Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick) has been chosen. She has set the date on October 2022. Her history of cases is public and well known.

3. The contract in question is public, well known, and well discussed.

All of these items are publicly available to you and me. Maybe I'll get some facts wrong, as I struggle to understand the case, but we're not exactly in rocket-science level or PH.D levels of legal theory here yet.

You're seemingly trying to make some kind of weird... meta-Argument like this is too complicated to understand? But its actually really simple so far.

https://i.postimg.cc/BQprkpLv/Screenshot-20220805-171518-Ins...

The main problem is that they aren't performing an analysis of mDAUs, as you imply. Their datasets are:

1. Followerwonk Random Sample – "Marc wrote code to randomly select public accounts from Followerwonk’s active database, and passed them to SparkToro for analysis. Casey on our team further scrubbed this list and ran 44,058 public, active accounts through our Fake Followers spam analysis process"

2. Aggregated Average of the Fake Followers Tool - "Over the last 3.5 years of operation, SparkToro’s Fake Followers tool has been run on 501,532 unique accounts, and analyzed thousands of followers for each of those, totaling more than 1 billion profiles (though these are not necessarily unique, and we don’t keep track of which profiles were analyzed as part of that process). ... We’ve included it for comparison, and to show that an analysis that includes simply random Twitter accounts (vs. those that have been recently active) may not be as accurate."

3. All Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter

4. Active Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter

5. Random Sample of 100 Users Following the @Twitter account

The last three datasets are obviously not relevant for getting a good estimate of mDAU authenticity. The second dataset may include inactive/duplicate accounts, and it's not clear how random the account selection is. The first dataset (as well as the second, to some extent) suffers from only including public, active accounts, which very much is not the same population Twitter is working with:

> We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.

In particular, note that Twitter has no requirement that mDAUs have public activity.

In addition, the article contains this bit at the bottom, which further reinforces that these numbers aren't comparable:

> 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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397137

Musk has pretty much used Twitter has his primary media communication method. Going so far as to say Tesla has no marketing budget because he's such a star on twitter. He has practically zero reach elsewhere. Sure, if he publishes on another platform, people will pay attention, but he doesn't... twitter is pretty much the way he communicates with the world.

If you dont think twitter is the reason you know Musk, then let me ask you this: who was the CEO of Fiskar? They released their EV product shortly before the model S. But you dont know the guys name do you? The product isnt why we know musk.