People are getting a lot of things wrong about the deal between Elon Musk and Twitter, here’s an explanation of five of the most common misconceptions. This article is based on the below video. Disclaimer I’m not a lawyer, and while I’ve read the contract and checked with lawyers who deal with M&A law to ensure correctness, this is not legal advice. Misconception #1 The dispute is about the number of total Twitter users that are bots. Twitter, unlike most other social networks, does not report total monthly active users. Twitter uses a metric called mDAU, (monetizable daily active users). The mDAU metric purports to show users who logged in and accessed Twitter and could view its ads. Twitter’s SEC filing doesn’t say that under 5% of total users are bots but that likely less than 5% of the mDAU are bots. Twitters SEC report reads in part “[W]e applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated”. Yes, mDAU’s are a bit murky. The proprietary nature of Twitter’s metric leads to speculation about what accounts the company considers a user. That means even very good quality analyses like the one by SparkToro & Followerwonk are likely to be incorrect about what Twitter considers an mDAU. The data patterns I’ve seen for users who click Twitter ads and engage off Twitter appear mostly human….Five Misconceptions About The Elon Musk Twitter Deal Explained