At some stage even Twitter has to step back and ponder whether an acquisition by Elon Musk is more trouble than the $54.20 per share he proposed paying.

Since announcing his intention to buy the social media firm, Musk has been fighting to get the firm to prove it’s bot problem is not as pervasive as it says. The social media firm claims that few than five percent of its user base are spam or bot accounts, a fact Musk has dismissed as false on several occasions.

At the weekend, responding to a thread from another user, Musk said that if Twitter just provided “their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms”. Musk has tried to refute Twitter’s claim with his own investigation but that was a sample of 100 followers on his account and that’s a rather biased way to approach data analysis.

However, the methodology for finding bots isn’t all Musk wants. Now he wants to debate Twitter chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal, about bots on Twitter.

I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage.

Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2022

This challenge was accompanied by a poll asking followers to vote on whether they believe less than five percent of Twitter’s users are fake or spam. The final results reveal 64.9 percent of 822 766 users say the claim is false with Musk declaring victory as “Twitter has spoken”. However, as a percentage of Twitter’s total 206 million daily active users, this represents just 0.25 percent of the website’s total user base. To be more accurate then Musk, your fans have spoken.

It’s also worth asking how Musk is drawing the conclusion that Twitter is filled with more bots than the firm claims.

In verified counterclaims regarding the upcoming trial which Twitter responded to last week, Musk’s legal team claimed it used a “publicly available machine learning algorithm”. Using this tool it discovered that a third of visible account may have been fake or spam. That’s a shocking revelation but say, what is that algorithm?

“Musk’s ‘preliminary expert estimates’ are nothing more than the output of running the wrong data through a generic web tool,” Twitter’s legal team wrote in response.

“Confirming the unreliability of Musk’s conclusion, he relies on an internet application called the ‘Botometer’ – which applies different standards than Twitter does and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot,” Twitter added.

We very much doubt Agrawal will kowtow to Musk and debate him, especially as the firm is preparing for a trial in October.

Perhaps Musk would do well to focus his efforts on preparing for that battle rather than trying to win favour with 0.25 percent of the platform he wanted to acquire.