Twitter says it removes 1 million spam and bot accounts daily

Twitter officials said Thursday on a call with executive that the company removes some 1 million spam accounts every day.

The number of spam accounts populating the site has recently become a public issue as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who put in a $44 billion bid to Twitter, has accused the company of having a far higher number of bots populating the site than previously reported.

Must has argued that the company has underrepresented the true number of "spam bots" on the platform. Twitter continues to argue that less than 5% of the accounts on the site are bots. 

To determine how many accounts are bots, the company says it reviews "thousands of accounts" selected at random, using both public and private IP addresses and other information.

Because advertisers rely on the number of users provided by social media platforms to determine where and how much money they will spend, the the true number of bot accounts on a given site is an important metric in determining the value of a platform. 

According to the Associated Press, several reports last month indicated that Twitter offered Musk access to its "firehose" of raw data on hundreds of millions of tweets.