Elon Musk says he’s postponing his plan to gain Twitter “temporarily”

The proposal to acquire Twitter is on hold, tweeted Elon Musk.

“Waiting for proof that spam and false accounts indeed make up fewer than 5% of users,” he said.

For the first three months of 2022, Twitter expected through an official filing that these sorts of accounts will make up 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users, which was included in the tweet.

By looking at the tweet, it appears that Musk has some doubts about the data. However, it is not obvious how he and Twitter will validate them.

If you have not heard, Elon Musk is in the process of purchasing Twitter for $44 billion. It is his stated goal to double the user base, beat spam bots, authenticate all people, and make its algorithms open-source, while simultaneously promoting free expression and reversing content moderation.

This included a promise to lift Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump and others.

Many social media moderation specialists believe these aims contradict one other. According to Alex Stamos, Facebook’s ex-chief security officer, there’s a “huge discrepancy between the US and the UK’s Online Safety Bill and EU Digital Services Act and Digital Market Acts” when it comes to Twitter policies.

Stamos also remarked that the developed world is now saturated with Twitter, so any development “would need significantly more dealing with the issues of autocracies and emerging democracies.”