{"id":1965,"date":"2022-10-31T11:49:49","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T15:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/?p=1965"},"modified":"2022-10-31T11:49:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T15:49:50","slug":"musk-now-gets-chance-to-defeat-twitters-many-fake-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/?p=1965","title":{"rendered":"Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter\u2019s many fake accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Twitter\u2019s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk<\/a>, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or \u201cdie trying!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he\u2019s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge carries high stakes. The bot count matters because advertisers \u2014 Twitter\u2019s chief revenue source \u2014 want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It\u2019s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,\u201d said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the \u201cvalue of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,\u201d or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find out just how bad the bots are, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, he sought to prove that Twitter was misleading the public when it said fewer than 5% of its daily active users are fake or spam accounts. If Twitter lied or withheld crucial information about the bot count, Musk could argue that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he had no real interest in whether Musk ultimately ended up owning the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he hoped that \u201cany findings would be able to help improve the platform,\u201d Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his planned role as Musk\u2019s expert trial witness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara\u2019s presentation \u2014 some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents \u2014 is locked up in confidential court filings, and he said he can\u2019t disclose his conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter\u2019s former leaders and its lawyers said Musk wildly exaggerated the problem because he had buyer\u2019s remorse. Precise counts are \u201calmost impossible\u201d because any bot estimate is based on assumptions that can lead to bias, said Filippo Menczer, a researcher who has been studying social bots for more than a decade and was consulted by Twitter earlier this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNobody knows exactly how bad the problem is,\u201d said Menczer, director of Indiana University\u2019s Observatory on Social Media, who said he was speaking from his role as an academic researcher, not a consultant. \u201cI would guess it\u2019s not as bad as Musk said and not as good as Twitter claimed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many experts also doubt Musk\u2019s ability to easily make improvements, which he\u2019s suggested would rely on using algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implementing new measures to \u201cauthenticate\u201d real people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trevor Davis, the firm\u2019s founder and CEO, said that analysis was based on a \u201cfirehose\u201d<\/a> of internal data that Twitter gave to Musk, but the company declined to provide additional data sought by Musk\u2019s team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe expect that access to the withheld data would reveal an even higher true spam rate,\u201d Davis said in a prepared statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk has long been preoccupied with Twitter spambots promoting cryptocurrency schemes, in part because as a celebrity user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts mimicking Musk\u2019s name and likeness to try to get people to think he\u2019s endorsing something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of automated accounts that report the weather, earthquakes or post humor or lines from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, which protects free speech and privacy \u2014 especially in authoritarian regions. But that practice can make it harder to root out malicious fake accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ferrara first caught Twitter\u2019s attention in the aftermath of revelations that Russia used social media to meddle in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, when he led a research group that estimated that 9% to 15% of Twitter\u2019s active English-language accounts were bots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a blog post soon after, Twitter complained that such outside research \u201cis often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.\u201d The company has repeatedly reported the under-5% number in its quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also cautions that it could be higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Musk\u2019s takeover, Twitter said it removed 1 million spam accounts each day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter reviews thousands of accounts sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have tussled over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls mDAU, for monetizable daily active usage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That \u201cis literally a metric they invented,\u201d Ferrara said. \u201cYou cannot contrast and compare that metric with any other service.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Musk first started publicly raising questions about the bot numbers after agreeing to buy the company, another firm, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat elusive number you are looking for … we have it. It\u2019s 13.7%,\u201d the firm tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk\u2019s Twitter handle to get his attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyabra\u2019s machine-learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to pick out which are behaving like humans. Such guesswork can misfire \u2014 but the tweet caught the attention of people close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working with the Musk camp by the end of May. Regardless of what the true count is, he said it\u2019s not going to be an easy problem to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSome bots are definitely nefarious,\u201d Brahmy said. \u201cThe trade-offs are between being extremely high on sign-up standards and information security versus being extremely open minded in a way\u201d that fosters freedom of speech and creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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