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- The company stopped reporting monthly users, because that metric “was subject to negative swings” due to the banning of “large numbers of inappropriate accounts and botnets.” Instead, Twitter made up a new proprietary metric called mDAU (monetizable daily active Twitter users) that would allow the company to “report numbers that would reassure shareholders and advertisers,” and which helped executives get bonuses, which can exceed $10 million.
- Executives are incentivized to not count spam bots for the new proprietary metric because it is reported to advertisers. “If mDAU includes spam bots that do not click through ads to buy products, then advertisers conclude the ads are less effective,” the lawyers wrote.
- “There are many millions of active accounts that are not considered ‘mDAU,’ either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it can monetize them,” the complaint read. “Musk is correct: Twitter executives have little or no personal incentive to accurately ‘detect’ or measure the prevalence of spam bots.”
- Zatko’s lawyers then claimed that “Mudge learned deliberate ignorance was the norm amongst the executive leadership team” when he asked Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity how many accounts are spam. The response was “we don’t really know,” because they didn’t know how to measure, they “were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse,” and “senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts” because “they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
- According to the complaint, Zatko saw a Twitter executive say the company “intentionally and knowingly deprioritized” the health of the platform to focus on the mDAU metric.
- A Twitter executive proposed disabling a mechanism that flags potentially spam accounts, puts them in a mode where they can only read Twitter, and sends them an SMS to the associated phone number to verify that they are controlled by a human.
- “Musk’s suspicions are on target: senior executives earn bonuses not for cutting spam, but for growing mDAU. In fact, Twitter created the mDAU metric precisely to avoid having to honestly answer the very questions Mr. Musk raised.”
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“A more meaningful and honest answer to Mr. Musk’s question would be trivial for Twitter to calculate, given that Twitter is already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mDAU. But this number is likely to be meaningfully higher than 5%,” the lawyers wrote, adding that executives would routinely report raw numbers of spam accounts during board meetings, without providing any context “to understand the overall prevalence of fake accounts.”A Twitter spokesperson sent Motherboard a statement: “Mr. Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance. What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context. Mr. Zatko's allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders. Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and will continue to be.”Subscribe to our podcast, CYBER. Subscribe to our new Twitch channel.Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.