Elon Musk’s Acquisition of Twitter On Hold
On April 27th I had written about the implications of a takeover by Elon Musk. As this development continues to unfold, it is unclear why this purchase is now on hold.
The hold as suggested in the Tweet above has to do with calculating the number of spam and fake accounts. But the central question here is, why should that matter if the acquisition was announced some time ago?
Others have jumped into this question, and it lacks context. If you understand it, drop comments to research this developing story further.
According to a Reuters analysis, Musk has violated a non-disclosure agreement. In addition, Musk has a different agenda here. Below, he Tweeted out he was going to sample 100 followers.
When you take any sort of class or course in statistics, the size of the sample is crucial to not have a biased analysis and to get a reliable analysis. Musk is perfectly aware of this.
Granted, you can conduct your own research to figure it out, but for the purpose of this story, I wanted to ground us in the facts instead of confusion or soap opera. More in the next section
About the 100 followers random sample
For sample analysis, each platform has different APIs and algorithms. However, there are automated accounts and bots all present on all of them, which is a problem to determine at times if the content shared is real of fake news.
I did a search of this on Google:
- “random sample to analyze fake accounts on social media examples”
After going through four or five of the search results, two different studies analyzed much bigger samples. One study by Stanford looked at 275,000 accounts, and another one by several institutes samples 500,000 studies. Both explain in great depth the intricacies of the samples and how they did it.
Not sure why the fuss over the acquisition and talking about a sample that is too small.
If Musk is not interested in the purchase, something else is happening financially with SpaceX or Tesla. As reported by Yahoo Finance, he can walk away and pay a $1 billion dollar breakup fee or fine.
Perhaps he wants the price to be lower, or figure out the executives who are not in favor of a takeover. In other words, who is against him and using this approach to bring to the light those who will offer formidable resistance.
Free Speech, Definitely Gone Missing
As I mentioned before, Musk wants Trump to return to Twitter.
This is more political than free speech. With how this purchase has evolved, he is using the controversial approach and hyping everything up since the midterm elections are in the fall.
As far as freedom of speech, it is not certain Musk can guarantee such a thing since he is not an ambassador of free speech, especially if it critiques him in any sort of way or fashion.
