Elon Musk never ends try hard to take over Twitter took another strange turn when the social media platform appeared to have accepted the businessman’s request to gain access to the “fire hose” of internal data held by the company.
For weeks, Musk has pressed Twitter to provide data that would allow the South African businessman to check if a significant portion of the platform’s users are fake bot accounts – something he believes will lower the price. which he is willing to pay the company. Musk thinks bot accounts make up more than 5% of Twitter’s user base — even though Musk’s critics believe it’s true—And wants the company to refute that.
Twitter reported a lower number of non-authenticating accounts in financial resultsand follow washington articles, it willingly grants Musk access to every tweet posted daily, along with detailed user information, to enable him to look for inauthentic behavior. (Informally, this data is known as “fire hydrant.” Twitter declined WIRED’s request to confirm or deny it. parcel reports.) Twitter’s apparent willingness to give Musk access to the data stream comes days after the lawsuit’s attorney filed letter to the company saying that it was “actively resisting and hindering [Musk’s] right to information,” and threatened to withdraw from the agreement.
The reported change to grant Musk access to the data is significant, and it raises two key questions: One, is Musk getting what he wants from the data he’s been provided with? are not? And two: What does he gain access to mean for everyday user privacy and security?
For Axel Bruns, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology, the move was described by Twitter as Musk’s bluff. “By giving him access to a fire hydrant, Twitter can say, ‘Prove your claim to the abundance of bots,'” he said. Bruns believes Musk and anyone he hires to monitor the bot will have a hard time. But even for someone with the necessary skills to handle that level of data, it is unlikely to be the right method to answer the question. It’s uncertain whether access to the fire hydrants of the 500 million tweets posted to the social media platform every day will really help Musk answer the key question he insists is holding on to his Twitter purchase. : Percentage of users who are bots. Paddy Leerssen, a researcher in information law at the University of Amsterdam, said: “It seems a bit effective. “My feeling is that this data is not the data you need to figure out who is a bot or not.”
Being able to pinpoint what makes a bot a bot has been a hotly debated topic in academia, one that experts have devoted much of their working lives to — which is why they are skeptical that access to all tweets posted to Twitter will answer the bot question definitively enough to convince Musk to keep buying. “My impression is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is to spot bots,” says Leerssen. “A tool like this [the fire hose] won’t let you do that, unless you combine it with all sorts of other research methods. I don’t think it’s something that in a timeline like this, Elon Musk would have time for. The man who could answer how that data would help him identify bots, Musk himself, did not respond to an email request for comment.
