Twitter says it removes more than 1 million spam accounts every day

Twitter executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday that over 1 million spam accounts are removed from the social media platform every day. The briefing comes after Elon Musk threatened to end the Twitter deal, accusing the company of not providing information about spam and fake accounts.

Elon Musk originally made an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. In mid-May, Musk said in a tweet that his bid to acquire the social media company can’t move forward until the company proves spam/fake accounts make up fewer than 5% of its users. 

Twitter reiterated on a conference call that spam accounts were fewer than5% of users who are served advertising. The company said human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service.

Twitter said it doesn’t believe the calculation of such accounts could be done externally as it would require private info, but declined to comment on the type of data it would provide to Musk.