Musk, who originally said part of his plan for owning Twitter was to “beat the spam bots,” has recently accused Twitter of lying about the number of bots on its platform, arguing it should be able to be out of business if Twitter won’t necessarily provide the information to back up its publicly reported estimates. Twitter (TWTR) has sued Musk to force him to close the deal. Musk’s response to Twitter’s lawsuit, released Friday, says the billionaire’s team used Twitter’s “fire engine” of tweets and botometers to analyze the number of bots on the platform. Musk’s response claimed that according to his analysis, “fake or spam accounts” accounted for 33% of viewable accounts on the platform and about 10% of monetizable daily active users during the first week of July. Twitter has long claimed in public filings that such accounts account for less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users.
Yang, one of the creators of Botometer, said he hadn’t heard from Musk’s team and was surprised to see the world’s richest man use his tool.
“To be honest, you know Elon Musk is really rich, right? I assumed he would spend money hiring people to develop some sophisticated tool or method himself,” Yang told CNN Business on Monday. Instead, Musk chose the Indiana University team’s free, publicly available tool.
Twitter has repeatedly argued that bots aren’t really relevant to closing the deal after Musk signed a binding contract that doesn’t include bot-related carve-outs. Still, the company hit back in a response to Musk’s response, noting that Botometer uses a different method than the company to classify accounts and “earlier this year Musk himself identified as most likely a bot.”
According to Yang, Botometer actually looks at the issue a little differently. The tool does not indicate whether an account is fake or spam, nor does it attempt to otherwise assess the intent of the account. Instead, it shows how likely it is that an account is automated – or managed using software – taking into account various considerations such as: B. the time of day it tweets, or whether it declares itself as a bot. “Of course there’s overlap, but they’re not exactly the same thing,” he said.
The distinction highlights what could become a key challenge in the Musk-Twitter litigation: There is no single, clear definition of a “bot.” Some bots are harmless (and in certain cases, even helpful) automated accounts, such as For example, those who tweet weather or news updates. In other cases, a human might be behind a fake or fraudulent account, making it difficult to detect using automated systems designed to weed out bots.
Botometer provides a score from zero to five indicating whether an account appears “human-like” or “bot-like”. Contrary to Twitter’s characterization The tool has rated Musk’s account at about one out of five on the bot scale since at least June — suggesting there’s almost certainly a human behind the account. For example, it shows that Musk tweets fairly consistently every day of the week, and his average tweeting hours reflect a human schedule. (By contrast, a bot could tweet all night long while most people are sleeping.)
But in many cases, Yang said, the difference between bot and not can be blurry. For example, a human could log in and tweet from a normally automated account. In this sense, The tool isn’t necessarily useful for clearly classifying accounts.
“It’s tempting to set an arbitrary threshold and consider anything above that number a bot and anything below a human, but we don’t recommend that approach,” the Botometer website said in a statement. “Binary classification of two-class accounts is problematic because few accounts are fully automated.”
Additionally, Twitter’s Firehose only shows accounts that tweet, so the evaluation would omit bot accounts whose purpose, for example, is simply to increase the number of followers of other users — a form of inauthentic behavior that doesn’t involve tweeting, he said Yang .
Musk’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story. However, Musk’s response acknowledges that his analysis was “limited” due to the limited data provided by Twitter and the limited time he had to conduct the assessment. It added that he continues to seek additional data from Twitter.
According to Yang, there is private data from Twitter — like IP addresses and how much time a user spends viewing the app on their devices — that could make it easier to assess whether an account is a bot. However, Twitter claims to have already provided Musk with more than enough information. It may be reluctant to share such data, which could pose a competitive risk or undermine user privacy, to a billionaire who now says he no longer wants to buy the company and has even hinted at launching a competing platform.