New York
CNN Business
–
Elon Musk spent weeks raising alarms that Twitter may have far more fake accounts, spam and bots than previously disclosed, and threatening to walk away from his $44 billion deal to buy the company if it didn’t him more information to assess the matter.
Now, Twitter apparently plans to offer Musk its own “fireplace” of data related to tweets on the platform, according to recent reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times. Twitter firehose is the real-time stream of millions of public tweets posted on the platform every day and information about the accounts behind them, although it does not contain private information such as IP addresses. from which the tweet was posted.
Twitter ( TWTR ) may have been backed into a corner after Musk’s lawyer argued that he was being denied information to which he is entitled under the deal. But in giving up access to the data firehose, Twitter ( TWTR ) risks trying to address a problem — Musk’s dubious threats to back out of the acquisition over bot activity, which some analysts believe is just a pretext for abandoned a deal he now thinks is overpriced – possibly creating new issues.
The seemingly unprecedented nature of sharing such data with Musk — an individual who doesn’t work for the company, isn’t a researcher, and doesn’t belong to some of the companies that pay to access the data — could create a number of unknowns, from competing risks to privacy concerns, some industry observers note. And that’s not to mention Musk’s history of inflammatory and sometimes erratic behavior online and offline.
“Musk in the past, we’ve seen that he’s an iconoclast, he likes to air grievances openly, on social media,” said Inga Trauthig, a senior researcher at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Other companies have access to this data, she notes, but “they probably have extremely detailed NDA contracts. “Will Musk have the same?” is the first part of the question and the second is going to be, ‘will he stick to them?'”
In the letter seeking more data from Twitter, Musk’s lawyer said the billionaire would ensure that “anyone reviewing the data is bound by a non-disclosure agreement” and would not “store or use any sensitive competitive information if the transaction it doesn’t end.” However, Musk tweeted just last month that Twitter’s legal team had contacted him to “complain that I violated their NDA” with another comment he made about bots.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the report that the company will share the firehose with Musk, but pointed to an earlier statement saying the company has and will continue to proactively share information with Musk in accordance with the agreement. of purchase.
Beyond the unknowns of how exactly Musk will use the data, there are questions about what, if anything, Musk will be able to extract from the data that the company itself cannot. Twitter regularly publishes its own estimates of the number of bots on the platform, and has said that such accounts make up less than 5% of its daily profitable active users. Among its social media peers, Twitter has historically been the most transparent about bot activity on its platform by making public disclosures, among other steps, according to Trauthig.
That he’s now suddenly fixated on bots as an issue “either means that Musk really wasn’t fully aware of how social media in general, and Twitter in particular, works, or it’s some kind of political maneuvering,” he said. she.
Musk told a tech conference in Miami last month that he believes bots and fake users make up at least 20% of Twitter’s user base, and possibly as much as 90%. While some experts think the presence of robots may be slightly higher than the company estimates, most believe the number is not as high as Musk has suggested.
The exact number of robots seems “largely irrelevant” if Musk’s claim is that “because of his business acumen and technical knowledge … he can make this company profitable and more useful,” said Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington. School of Law and a founding co-director of the UW Tech Policy Lab.
Furthermore, there is no clear definition of what a bot, spam or fake account is, and they are not all problematic – although Musk, who is known to have many spam accounts following him, has described them widely as a wound. “I think trust is extremely important, and just for the benefit of the system, getting rid of troll farms, bots and spammers is incredibly important,” he told Twitter employees at a company town hall event Thursday.
Typically, bots are considered to be accounts that use automated computer systems, in whole or in part, to post and interact with other users, according to Kaicheng Yang, who researches inauthentic actors in social media with the Indiana University Media Observatory Social. Some automated accounts are harmless, like news update accounts or a Big Ben account that tweets “BONG” on the hour, every hour. And some accounts are run by people who appear to be deliberately mimicking computer behavior to alienate other users.
“We don’t even have a clear definition of what we’re talking about,” said Yang, who created a tool called Botometer that examines the bot-like activity of Twitter accounts. He added that automation in itself isn’t bad, “it’s a feature that Twitter provides and helps in a lot of cases, and sometimes it’s just for fun.”
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal referred to those challenges inherent in counting bots during a meeting with Musk on Twitter last month. “Spam is not simply ‘binary’ (human / non-human),” Agrawal posted on Twitter. “The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation … they are sophisticated and difficult to catch.” (Musk responded to Agrawal’s tweet thread with an emoji.)
Simply examining the data on tweets that are posted on Twitter may leave out some bot or fake accounts that are not actually posted on the platform. “One of the main ways inauthentic behavior is used in the political environment is to make someone look more popular than they are by creating a bunch of random accounts and following them … having access to the firehose doesn’t even give you a accurate picture of inauthentic behavior that can be problematic,” Calo said.
“I think it defies the imagination that Musk and his associates would be in a better position to give a bona fide assessment of what automated activity is,” Calo said. “So it’s like sharing a lot of information for no good reason, and every time you do that, it raises concerns.”
Even if Musk comes up with a number of bots that make him comfortable with closing the acquisition deal for Twitter, it’s not clear exactly what he’ll do about it.
During Thursday’s town hall, Musk suggested the company should authenticate users behind accounts in order to flag accounts that aren’t automated — potentially requiring them to sign up with Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue — and promote content from them. verified accounts. However, some Internet security experts and Twitter employees have raised concerns that such a system could remove the anonymity that allows, for example, users in certain countries to speak freely.
