Musk vows ‘death or glory’ in spambot war
>>NEW YORK: Billionaire Elon Musk on Friday put on hold his US$44 billion (1.5 trillion baht)-takeover plan for Twitter, as he waited for details on the microblogging platform’s claim that fake accounts comprise less than 5% of users.
Mr Musk, who has made weeding out fake Twitter accounts and spambots the central theme of his takeover plan, said if he buys the social-media platform he “will defeat the spambots or die trying”.
Twitter, like other social media companies, has been battling spambots over the past few years through software that spots and blocks them.
Spambots or fake accounts are designed to manipulate or artificially boost activity on social-media platforms such as Twitter.
If accounts on the platform engage in “bulk, aggressive or deceptive activity that misleads people”, then these activities are considered as platform manipulation, according to the company’s policy.
Overlapping accounts that share similar content, mass registrations of accounts, using automated or coordinated accounts to create fake engagements and trading in followers are listed as violations of Twitter’s spam policy.
Twitter has a team that identifies real people and robots on its platform. The company uses machine learning and investigators to recognize patterns of malicious activity.
Twitter, however, allows parody, newsfeed, commentary, and fan accounts, provided they disclose the nature of the account in the bio.
When Twitter detects a fake account, it may lock the account or seek verification. In case of multiple accounts, the user may be asked to keep one.
Mr Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, wants Twitter to become a forum for free speech, “the bedrock of a functioning democracy”, and sees spam bots as a threat to this idea.
In a TedX interview, he said his top priority was to remove “bot armies” on Twitter, calling out bots that promote crypto-based scams on Twitter.
“They make the product much worse. If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion Dogecoin.”