The businessman claims to remain committed to the acquisition

MADRID, 13 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Elon Musk has decided to temporarily suspend the purchase of Twitter, which he agreed to at the end of last April for some 44,000 million dollars (42,156 million euros), pending further details on the proportion of false accounts and 'bots' on the total number of active users of the social network, as reported by the tycoon through his official profile.

"Twitter deal temporarily suspended pending details supporting estimate that fake/spam accounts account for less than 5% of users," Musk said, citing a Reuters article on the company's estimate of the proportion. of fake accounts among active Twitter users.

Musk's announcement has caused panic among investors, sinking Twitter's price prior to the opening of Wall Street by almost 20%, although the businessman later published another tweet in which he claimed to be "still committed to the acquisition ", after which the share price reduced its pre-opening drop to around 10%.

Twitter acknowledged in the documentation registered with the United States Securities Market Commission (SEC) after publishing its quarterly accounts that "there are inherent challenges in measuring the use and participation" of the large number of total accounts of the social network throughout the world, adding that the metrics may be affected by efforts to reduce malicious activity on the service, including spam, malicious automation and fake accounts.

In this sense, the company explained that, after an internal review of a sample of accounts, it estimated that the average number of fake or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 "represented less than 5%" of active monthly users in the quarter.

However, Twitter admitted that such estimate of fake or spam accounts "may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts," admitting that the actual number of active fake or spam accounts on the social network "could be higher than estimated." ".

In the presentation of its results for the first quarter on April 28, Twitter acknowledged an error whereby from the first quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021 it had overestimated the calculation of its monetizable active daily users by almost two million users. accounts.

In this sense, Twitter then explained that with the launch in March 2019 of a function that allowed multiple separate accounts to be linked "an error was made at that time", so that the actions carried out through the main account resulted in all linked accounts will be counted as active users.

"This resulted in an overestimation of mDAU from the first quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021," reported the company, which thus cut its number of monetizable active daily users at the end of 2021 to 214.7 million, compared to 216.6 million initially estimated.

Specifically, the company had calculated an excess of 1.5 million mDAU internationally, with 178.8 million instead of the actual 177.3 million, while in the United States it had estimated a total of 37.8 million mDAU, compared to 37.5 million in the updated data after correcting the error.

This is the second time that Twitter has admitted a similar miscalculation in one of the variables the market most closely tracks, having discovered in 2017 that it had overestimated its active users for three years.