World

Twitter: Musk has a chance to beat fake accounts

Twitter’s never-ending battle against spam accounts is currently an issue for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat bot disaster or “try to die!”

He later cited the bot as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has closed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to wipe out the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and rattled Twitter long before he did. expressed interest in acquiring it.

High stakes challenge. The number of bots matters because advertisers – Twitter’s main source of revenue – want to know roughly how many real people they are reaching when buying ads. It’s also crucial in efforts to prevent bad guys from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.

“The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for people,” says bot counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who has worked all summer to investigate the issue for Musk, said. He cited the “value of this platform as a social experience, as a collective place to have civilized discussions and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.

To find out how bad the bots were, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, he sought to prove that Twitter misled the public by stating that less than 5% of its daily active users were fake or spam accounts. If Twitter lied or hid important information about the number of bots, Musk could argue that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion deal.

Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he doesn’t really care if Musk ultimately owns the platform.

Instead, he hopes that “any findings will be able to help improve the platform,” Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his expected role as a trial witness. Musk’s expertise.

The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara’s presentation – some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents – is locked in confidential court records, and he said he could not disclose his conclusions.

Former Twitter executives and its lawyers say Musk exaggerated the matter because he has buyer remorse. Filippo Menczer, a researcher who has studied social bots for more than a decade and was consulted by Twitter earlier this year, said accurate counting is “nearly impossible” because any bot estimates are based on on assumptions that could lead to bias.

“Nobody knows exactly how bad the problem is,” said Menczer, director of the Indiana University Social Media Observatory, who said he was speaking as an academic researcher, not is a consultant. “I guess it’s not as bad as Musk says and not as good as Twitter claims.”

Many experts also doubt Musk’s ability to easily implement improvements, which he suggests will rely on the use of algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implement new measures to prevent fraud. “authentication” of real people.

Earlier this month, Ferrara was preparing to head to the East Coast to testify in Delaware, where Musk is defending Twitter’s lawsuit asking the court to force him to close the deal. But two weeks before the trial scheduled for October 17, Musk changed his mind and said he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition. It is closed on Thursdays.

Most legal experts don’t think Musk has that many cases. The court’s chief judge is likely to side with Twitter based on the specific terms and conditions of the April purchase agreement.

But that doesn’t mean Musk doesn’t take a stance on bots, according to Ferrara and other researchers hired by Musk’s legal team.

Analytics firm CounterAction, which works with Ferrara, said it concluded in a July 18 report filed with the court that Twitter’s spam rate for monetizable accounts – those with value to advertisers – is at least 10% and can be as high as 14.2%, depending on how the rate is measured.

Trevor Davis, the company’s founder and CEO, said that the analysis was based on “a bunch of internal data” that Twitter provided to Musk, but the company declined to provide further data compiled by the team. Musk’s search.

“We expect that access to the withheld data will reveal a higher true spam rate,” Davis said in a prepared statement.

Musk has long been preoccupied with spambots on Twitter promoting crypto schemes, in part because as a popular user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts that mimic Musk’s name and image to try to make people think he’s endorsing something.

Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of accounts that automatically report weather, earthquakes, or post funny stories or from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, privacy protection, and free speech – especially in authoritarian regions. But that fact can make it harder to weed out malicious fake accounts.

Ferrara first caught the attention of Twitter after revealing that Russia used the social network to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, when he led a research team that estimated that 9% came 15% of active English accounts on Twitter are bots.

In a blog post shortly after, Twitter complained that such outside research “is often methodically inaccurate and flawed”. The company has repeatedly reported numbers below 5% in its quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also warned that the figure could be higher.

Before Musk took over, Twitter said it was removing 1 million spam accounts every day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter looks at thousands of randomly sampled accounts, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geographic locations, and how the account works when it works.

But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have argued over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls the mDAU, for monetized daily active usage.

“It’s really a metric they invented,” says Ferrara. “You cannot collate and compare that metric with any other service.”

When Musk first began publicly questioning the number of bots after agreeing to buy the company, another company, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.

“The elusive number you’re looking for… we have it. It is 13.7%,” the company tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk’s Twitter handle to get his attention.

Cyabra’s machine learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to find human-like behaviors. Such conjectures could be wrong – but the tweet caught the attention of those close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.

Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working on the Musk camp in late May. Regardless of the actual number, he says it won’t be an easy problem to solve.

“Some bots are definitely nefarious,” Brahmy said. “The trade-off between being extremely high on registration standards and information security versus being extremely open to how” promotes freedom of expression and creativity.



Source by [author_name]

news7h

News7h: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button