{"id":15932,"date":"2022-08-19T08:33:10","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T08:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hamslivenews.com\/?p=15932"},"modified":"2022-08-19T08:33:10","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T08:33:10","slug":"doubts-cast-over-elon-musks-twitter-bot-assertions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamslive.com\/news\/2022\/08\/doubts-cast-over-elon-musks-twitter-bot-assertions\/","title":{"rendered":"Doubts cast over Elon Musk’s Twitter bot assertions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Filings that were made by Elon Musk’s legal team in his battle with Twitter have been questioned by leading bot researchers.<\/h2>\n

A botometer which is an online tool that tracks spam and fake accounts -was used by Mr Musk in a countersuit against Twitter and while using the tool, Mr Musk’s team estimated that 33% of “visible accounts” on the social media platform were “false or spam accounts”.<\/p>\n

However, Botometer creator and maintainer, Kaicheng Yang, said the figure “doesn’t mean anything”.\u00a0 Mr Yang challenged the methodology used by Mr Musk’s team and told the BBC they had not approached him before using the tool.<\/p>\n

Mr Musk is currently in dispute with Twitter, after trying to pull out of a deal to purchase the company for $44bn (\u00a336.6bn).\u00a0 A court case is due in October in Delaware, where a judge will rule on whether Mr Musk will have to buy it.<\/p>\n

In July, Mr Musk said he no longer desired to purchase Twitter as he could not verify how many humans were on the platform.<\/p>\n

Since then, the world’s richest person has claimed repeatedly that fake and spam accounts could be many times higher than stated by Twitter.<\/p>\n

In his countersuit that he made public on 5 August, he claimed a third of visible Twitter accounts, estimated by his team, were fake. Utilizing that figure the team estimated that a minimum of 10% of daily active users are bots.<\/p>\n

Twitter says it estimates that fewer than 5% of its daily active users are bot accounts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Parag Agrawal, the new chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter, Inc tweets, “Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.”<\/p>\n

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Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.<\/p>\n

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n