The Twitter Lawsuit Against Elon Musk May Reveal a Truth That No One Is Ready to Hear.
80% of Twitter accounts could in fact be bots ...
It's no longer a secret: Elon Musk no longer wants to buy Twitter. By now, everyone has heard about the failed acquisition and the looming legal case between Twitter, a company that did not seek to be bought, and Elon Musk, who rescinded his offer to buy the company.
At the center of this dispute is bots trafficking. It's almost certain that Twitter's bot traffic is far greater than what is publicly expressed and what teams imagine internally. In all honesty, this is probably the case for all organizations that are targeted by malicious or unwanted bots but don't use the best technologies to eliminate them.
The social network model favors the proliferation of bots
In the case of Twitter, one of the main motivations is to get new accounts created. There is a perception that the more followers a person has, the more interesting their tweets are, and indeed, the accounts with the most followers tend to be more influential.
This model can then become worrisome when it aims to amplify influence. Imagine the influence you could have by automatically controlling millions of Twitter accounts that interact with the real accounts of public figures and private citizens. This is likely to attract highly motivated state actors with virtually unlimited resources.
If there is an incentive and means, there will be more bots
Not only is the incentive huge on Twitter, but there are ways. There are countless services on the Internet (including dark/deep web marketplaces) that offer Twitter accounts, followers, likes, and retweets for a fee.
For less than $1,000, it is possible to get close to 100,000 followers, who retweet anything and everything. These accounts have names that have little meaning to humans, and they follow many other accounts.
Creating a Twitter account using automation is particularly easy. If you take a closer look, it is possible to write a script that automatically creates Twitter accounts. Without changing the IP address or the account name.
Companies often underestimate the magnitude of the bots’ problem
A few years ago, an American social network deployed a bot defense strategy and discovered that 99% of its login traffic was automated.
80-99% of traffic is automated on many applications. These findings are not an isolated case - they are common to many organizations (merchants, financial institutions, telecom companies, and fast food companies, to name a few).
The news was of course devastating to the company. They knew they had a bot problem, but never imagined it was this serious. The consequences were quickly felt. Only a tiny fraction of their customer accounts were actual human customers. The majority were bots.
For social networks, the number of daily active users (DAU), which is a subset of all accounts, plays an important role in evaluation. The revelation that their DAU was only a fraction of what they thought it resulted in a significant drop in their value.
Would it then have been better for the shareholders of this company to never learn the truth and just claim that their bot problem was less than 5%? Without a doubt, yes.
This pressure doesn't just apply to social networking sites whose valuation is determined by the number of DAUs. It also applies to companies that sell high-demand products with limited inventory, such as concert tickets, sneakers, designer handbags, or the next iPhone.
When these types of products are sold in minutes to robots, only to be resold at very high prices, it creates customer dissatisfaction, but the company manages to sell out its entire inventory quickly, and then nothing is done to control the process.
In these cases, a company may want to give the impression that it is doing everything it can to stop the bots when in reality it is doing very little.
Twitter is not an isolated case, because the problem of bots is the problem of all on the Internet
Twitter is not an isolated case, as the problem of bots is everyone's problem on the InternetAccording to the volume and speed of automation we see today, the sophistication of the bots, and the relative lack of countermeasures, one can easily make the following conclusion: in all likelihood, more than 80% of Twitter accounts are in fact bots.
No doubt Twitter is trying to prevent unwanted automation on its platform, as all companies do. But this is likely very sophisticated automation by highly motivated actors. Under these circumstances, fighting bots is no small task. It requires equally sophisticated tools.
However, there is something much more important at stake here. The problem of bots is more important than advertising revenue, stock price, or the valuation of a company. Failing to combat the use of bots threatens the entire foundation of our digital world.
Allowing bots to proliferate leads to the massive fraud that costs billions. It allows malicious nations and organizations to spread false information, influence political processes and even create potential conflicts.
If we as a society want to continue to enjoy all the knowledge, entertainment, and other benefits that the Internet and our mobile and connected world offer us, we must do something about automated online traffic. The only way to combat bots is to implement our own highly sophisticated automation.
The outcome of the Twitter-Elon Musk lawsuit in the fall of 2022 should therefore serve as a basis for moving toward betterment on the Internet comprehensively in the fight against bots, not as an excuse to simply point to one social network because the problem is bigger than just the Twitter-Elon Musk battle.
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