Billionaire Elon Musk, and the prospective new owner of Twitter, tweeted on Friday that his proposal to buy the social media company was “on hold” while he investigated the scope of the bot problem. Musk stated on Twitter that he will analyze a random sample of 100 followers of popular accounts to determine the genuine presence of spam on the network.
Bots and phony accounts have been a problem for Twitter since the platform’s inception 16 years ago. A Russian troll farm employed more than 50,000 bots to try to affect the presidential election in 2016, and Twitter leaders have promised to remedy the problem.
Experts claim that while the firm has made considerable headway in deleting more phony and spam accounts than ever before, artificial intelligence developments are spawning new ones that are becoming increasingly difficult to detect.
Tesla CEO Musk, who stated that he was pausing the deal and waiting for details supporting computation that spam/fake accounts do actually comprise less than 5% of users, should have expected none of this.
Musk was alluding to a Twitter regulatory filing earlier this month that stated that fraudulent or spam accounts made up less than 5% of the company’s 229 million daily active users.
The figure is not new: Twitter has been estimating the number of such accounts for years, despite the fact that opponents and experts believe the firm is underestimating the true number. For years, those who wanted to influence public opinion might buy hundreds of phony accounts to boost the popularity of a celebrity or a product.
The problem took a serious turn in 2016, when Russian agents from the Internet Research Agency used Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms to spread disinformation about the election in support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Twitter took action in response to the Russia scandal, which culminated in congressional hearings in 2017. By 2018, the firm had created a Healthy Conversations project and was removing over a million false accounts each day from its platform.
During this week’s Wall Street roller coaster, the net worth of the world’s richest man fell from $240 billion to $232 billion. Musk’s delayed disclosure of his significant investment in Twitter was also under investigation by the SEC. He is the company’s largest stakeholder, owning 9.2% of the company’s equity.
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