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| Elon Musk |
Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk is one of the most visible figures in the technology world today. The Tesla and SpaceX creator is known for his lofty objectives, such as colonizing Mars. He is sometimes compared to Howard Hughes, yet he is significantly more approachable than the secretive millionaire Hughes. The 47-year-old software tycoon frequently tweets, publishes on Facebook and appears on television.
Musk, Twitter Battle
Mr. Musk is now in a battle with Twitter after attempting to back out of a contract to buy the firm for $44 billion (£36.6 billion).
Leading bot experts have questioned Elon Musk's legal team's filings in his struggle with Twitter.
Mr. Musk employed Botometer, an internet program that detects spam and false accounts, in his countersuit against Twitter.
Mr. Musk's team assessed that 33% of "visible accounts" on the social networking site were "false or spam accounts" using the technique.
The statistic, according to Botometer founder and maintainer Kaicheng Yang, "doesn't imply anything."
A court hearing in Delaware in October will determine if Mr. Musk is required to purchase it.
Mr. Musk stated in July that he no longer intended to acquire the firm because he could not verify the number of persons using the platform.
Since then, the world's richest person has frequently asserted that the number of false and spam accounts might be several times more than Twitter claims.
In his countersuit, which was made public on August 5, he claimed that a third of accessible Twitter accounts were false, as determined by his staff. Based on that data, the researchers calculated that at least 10% of daily active users are bots.
Twitter claims that less than 5% of its daily active users are bots.
Behavior of Bots
The statements cast doubt on Mr. Musk's team's conclusions on bot counts on the platform.
According to Mr. Musk's team in their countersuit, "the Musk Parties' research has been hampered due to the scant data that Twitter has supplied and limited time in which to analyze that incomplete data."
The Observatory on Social Media at the University of Indiana created Botometer.
According to Clayton Davis, a data scientist who worked on the project, the system employs machine learning, as well as criteria such as tweet regularity and language variety, as well as other indicators of robotic behavior.
"Humans act in a specific way. If an account demonstrates enough behavior that differs from how people do things, it is possible that it is not human "he claims.
Only Twitter has the Bot's data.
Botometer's researchers have previously attempted to determine the number of spam and fraudulent accounts on Twitter.
The tool's creators released a study in 2017 estimating that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts were bots.
Mr. Davis, on the other hand, claims that the study was severely qualified and based on limited evidence.
"Twitter is the only individual who has a God's eye perspective," Mr. Davis claims.
Twitter claims to compute the number of fraudulent accounts mostly through human evaluation. It claims to randomly choose hundreds of accounts each quarter and search for bot activity.
Twitter claims that, unlike other public bot analysis tools, it also analyses private data, such as IP addresses, phone numbers, and geolocation, to determine if an account is legitimate or phony.
Twitter claims that its approach to Botometer is "very restricted."
It uses the example of a Twitter account with no photo or geographical information, which raises red lights for a public bot detector. However, the account's owner may have strong beliefs about privacy.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter claims that its method is the best way to determine how many false accounts exist.
According to Michael Kearney, inventor of Tweet Bot or Not, another public tool for evaluating bots, the volume of spam and false accounts on Twitter is largely due to definition.
Bot's Power
"Depending on how you define a bot," he explains, "you may have anywhere from less than 1% to 20%."
"A rigorous definition, I believe, would provide a rather low number. You must account for bot accounts, which exist and tweet at significantly larger volumes "He stated.
A bot has no commonly accepted definition. Is a bot, for example, a Twitter account that sends out automatic tweets but is managed by a human?
Fake accounts are frequently controlled by people, but bots are explicitly promoted on Twitter.
Despite this definitional issue, Twitter claims to find and delete over a million bot accounts per day using automated algorithms.
However, Twitter's filters do not capture them all, and the company recognizes that millions of accounts pass through the cracks. However, it claims that they account for a minuscule part of its 217 million daily active users.