Twitter makes structural changes amidst the pending acquisition

Twitter CEO announced that the company has gone through several changes in the leadership teams and operations in the past few days, and while the acquisition deal is expected to close, the changes were made considering all scenarios.

The structural changes have been cited as an attempt to improve the company's health which is affected by multiple factors of the macro-environment and would have been taken irrespective of the acquisition, mentioned Parag Agrawal, CEO, Twitter.

In a development that is touted to be one of the changes in the leadership teams, Kayvon Beykpour, Head Of Product, Twitter, and Co-Founder, Periscope, announced that he is leaving the company after a tenure of over 7 years. He was asked to resign by Agrawal as part of an effort to take the team in a different direction.

The environment at Twitter has been chaotic and uncertain for the past few days, with a number of changes coming in, and an acquisition that seems uncertain for now. The domino effect began with the company entering into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Elon Musk.

But potential uncertainty of the deal going through copped up when Elon Musk recently announced a temporary hold on the acquisition of Twitter, and its transformation to a privately-owned company, citing a finding on pending details supporting the calculation of spam or fake accounts on the platform.

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Musk shared a Reuters news report that states Twitter estimated fake or spam accounts represent fewer than 5% of monetizable daily active users in the first quarter. The Twitter Q1 2022 Report suggested average monetizable daily active users accounted for 229.0 Mn users for Q1.

He had previously mentioned that eliminating spam or fake accounts is a key area he’s looking at to improve with the takeover.

Agrawal addressed the concern around spam accounts in a thread of Tweets.

Along with sharing some generic info about spam accounts and how they disrupt advertiser campaigns and harm user experience, he mentioned that Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before users see them on the platform. Twitter also locks millions of accounts each week that they suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc). He further shares that spam accounts that may look real, and real accounts that may come across as spam are one of the major problems that cause friction.

The estimate that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts is a result of the slips caused by the inefficient machinery that may not be able to differentiate between spam and real accounts. The actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all under 5%.

Musk replied to this thread sharing the methodology of dealing with calculating spam accounts with a concern affecting advertisers on the platform and their campaigns executed on Twitter, along with the 'poop' emoji.