Twitter: What are the ‘bots’ Elon Musk paused shopping for?

The last few weeks, the purchase of Twitter for Elon Musk It has become the most mediatic case on the internet. However, the latest movements of the millionaires have become strange and have put the debate center bots.

On Tuesday, Musk said his deal to buy Twitter it cannot move forward unless it provides public proof that less than 5% of its accounts are fake or spam, as the company reported in a May 2 regulatory filing.

Musk has stepped up his battle against bots in recent days, calling on the US Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate claims of Twitter and asking its 93 million followers for feedback on their experience using the platform.

This fact has made it clear that Elon Musk he doesn’t want any more of them, but what are they really?

What is a Twitter bot?

And bot is an automated account that mimics the behavior of people on the social network. They can respond, send images or publish content following a series of parameters that depend on artificial intelligence or -simply- source codes.

There are known cases of bots from phone companies, for example, who automatically respond to user complaints and refer them to a direct message center number. Others help you generate video download links or others indicate the value of certain shares in the stock market.

However, while some may have some beneficial utility, the rest can be used maliciously.

Twitter, in 2021, it tried to release a tool to identify “good bots”. With this movement, the social network wants users to quickly know if they are interacting with humans or automated programs.

How do Twitter bots work?

Sometimes the bots they’re triggered by a word a real person uses in a tweet, prompting the account to send an automated reply.

This makes many believed to be for fraud or internet offenses. For example, some accounts are set up to only respond to specific people, like bots that targeted Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, according to Bot Sentinel.

But other dangerous ones can spread misinformation, including on key issues like COVID-19 and the election. They try to form a malicious opinion on topics of public debate.

The most serious are those who try to scam people, a variant that has grown with the popularity of cryptocurrencies: if a user talks about bitcoin or NFT, sooner rather than later they will have bot accounts offering them crypto gifts with links that seek to hijack private information.

Own Elon Musk he has called them “Twitter’s most annoying problem.”

66% of all internet traffic comes from bots related with cyber attacks, points out the cybersecurity firm Barracuda Networks.

According to the study, most of the traffic of bots it comes from two public clouds – AWS and Microsoft Azure – in very similar amounts, and they make up two-thirds of the total traffic on the Internet.

How many bots are there on Twitter?

Twitter points out that the percentage of bot accounts on the platform is 5%; Musk, however, assures that it is at least 20%.

Parag Agrawal made a thread on the social network noting that he estimates that “less than 5%” of accounts of Twitter son bots. He noted that spam and bots are serious problems facing all social media platforms, and more importantly, they are an evolving and “dynamic” problem. “Adversaries, their goals and tactics are constantly evolving, often in response to our work! You can’t create a set of rules to detect spam today and expect them to still work tomorrow.”

The billionaire assures that having so many bots in the social network is counterproductive. “So how do advertisers know what they are getting for their money? This is critical to the financial health of Twitter,” the millionaire said in a follow-up tweet.

Los bots they are negative because they worsen the experience of the user, who will feel harassed to maintain almost immediate contact with this type of account during his day to day. The value of the platform to real people is eroded if they lose faith in the integrity of the service.

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