tech billionaire
Twitter boss Elon Musk offers one million dollars to anyone who breaks up a large bot network for him
Elon Musk at an event in Shanghai
© SIPA PRESS / Action Press
Fake accounts are bad for Twitter – and for Elon Musk’s advertisers. Now the billionaire wants to hunt down the backers of the bot networks with a rather generous offer.
It is well known that Elon Musk has declared war on fake profiles and bots on Twitter. Before the tech billionaire bought the platform, he tried to lower the price with various estimates of the number of “fake” users. Because only real people are receptive to advertising and therefore interesting for its advertisers who place ads on Twitter. Now Musk is taking another step to declare war on fakes.
His anger is primarily aimed at so-called bot networks – groups that can use the appropriate technology to quickly create a large number of new accounts out of the ground. Such bot accounts are then fed with content of their choice, often of a political nature, retweet each other and thus give the corresponding messages a wide reach, although often only a few real people are behind them. Network security expert Steven Tey explains the first steps taken by Twitter against such networks: “The follow-to-follower ratio is gaining in importance. And ‘Twitter Blue’ subscribers are preferred by the algorithm.”
Elon Musk wants to stop bot networks
Other IT experts pointed out that such bot networks could also block legal accounts by reporting them en masse, or by sharing so-called “block lists” on which supposedly reprehensible accounts are listed, can persuade normal users to to block these accounts. Twitter owner Elon Musk sees the problem and racks his brains about it.
“Who is behind such bot networks?” he tweeted. “A million dollars bounty for whoever brings the perpetrators to justice.” However, the hunt for the bots is not likely to be that easy: the backers are likely to earn significantly more than the one million offered with dodgy contracts from politics and business, so that hardly anyone from the inner circles will chat. In addition, they are often located in countries that are difficult to access, such as Russia or even North Korea. In any case, so far no one has found a real antidote to the ever-growing fake accounts.
Sources: UniladTwitter