Elon Musk is detecting Twitter bots with a tool that ‘doesn’t mean anything’, says its creator
Botometer rates accounts between zero and five, with the lower number indicating that the account is a human
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Your support makes all the difference.Elon Musk’s legal team is using a tool to detect Twitter bots that its creator has said “doesn’t mean anything”.
The world’s richest man is currently trying to back out of his attempt to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, claiming the company has been hiding the true scale of bots and false users on its platform.
Mr Musk’s legal team has used the online tool Botometer to estimate that 33 per cent of "visible accounts" on the social media platform were "false or spam accounts", but the creator of Botometer, Kaicheng Yang, told the BBC that the figure "doesn’t mean anything".
Botometer uses parameters such as when and how often an account tweets, as well as the content of tweets, to make an estimate as to whether a user is a bot. However, it cannot give a definitive answer and there may be numerous factors not considered.
A user with no photo or location could simply be privacy-conscious, rather than fraudulent.
"In order to estimate the prevalence [of bots] you need to choose a threshold to cut the score," says Mr Yang. Botometer rates accounts between zero and five, with the lower number indicating that the account is a human.
"If you change the threshold from a three to a two then you will get more bots and less human. So how to choose this threshold is key to the answer of how many bots there are on the platform."
Mr Musk’s team has not explained what threshold he used to reach the 33 per cent answer. "It [the countersuit] doesn’t make the details clear, so he [Mr Musk] has the freedom to do whatever he wants. So the number to me, it doesn’t mean anything," Mr Yang said.
Twitter and Mr Musk have been trading blows legally, with Twitter ordered to provide documents from one of its fired executives to Mr Musk to analyse bot accounts.
However, Mr Musk demanded documents from 21 other Twitter employees, all of which were denied.
“If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,” Mr Musk had tweeted earlier this month.
However, he said if the company’s filings with the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) on the matter were found to be false, “then it should not”, challenging Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal to a debate about bots.
Mr Agrawal had previously published a long thread in which he said he would take on the issue “with the benefit of data, facts, and context”.
He said that Twitter estimated that the number of fake accounts was actually “well under” 5 per cent. But he also said that only Twitter could provide that estimate, because it relied on private information that Twitter was unable to share.
Mr Musk responded by sending Mr Agrawal the poop emoji.
The trial between Elon Musk and Twitter will take place in Delaware Court of Chancery for five days between 17 October and 21 October.
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