Stephanie Jones
W.Well, a good drama turn deserves another, which happened in the case of Elon Musk.
The world’s richest man has complained over the past few weeks that Twitter is underestimating the amount of automated spam bots on his site and will not give him access to the data needed to conduct an independent assessment, which he previously needed. The acquisition of his company will be completed. Twitter estimates that bots account for less than 5% of active accounts, a number recorded in many years of SEC filings. Since Musk was able to access the image from the outset, his sudden fixation seemed to work, a way to make an excuse to renegotiate his $ 44 billion offer to Twitter amid a massive drop in tech stock prices.
On Monday, Musk’s lawyer sent a trivial letter on Twitter saying it was better to override the data. Or. Or? Otherwise, Musk and his attorneys would consider their refusal a violation of the consolidation agreement and rescind the agreement, a dubious argument that probably won’t stand up in court – but one they could use to make things unpleasant for Twitter.
On Wednesday, we learned about Twitter’s own mask-type move. Business Is Spoken Preparing to give him access to his so-called “Firehose” API, a stream of every tweet sent. (Each. Tweet.) It does something like 500 million micro-blog massives every day. A Twitter spokesperson did not comment on exactly how he would share the trove with Musk, saying only: We believe this agreement is in the best interests of all shareholders. We want to close the transaction and implement the consolidation agreement at agreed prices and terms. “
To put it bluntly, giving Mask such extensive access to Twitter is totally exaggerated, a move he wanted to make. Do you want data? Here we have all the data. We’re not hiding anything. Enjoy! “It simply came to our notice then. You don’t want access to everything, “said Goran Murrick, a computer scientist at the USC’s Institute for Information Sciences who has worked with a similar Twitter API. In fact, Mask probably only needs to make the “Dichaus” API Twitter available to some researchers, which is 10% of all tweets. The difference between the results obtained from Decahose and Firehouse is “equal to the difference between a poll and a census,” Murrick said. The pole works with small, easy-to-use sample sizes. “And you can always get multiple polls and get pretty accurate results,” Murrick said, referring to what would create a more comprehensive census.
Of course, it’s funny to see Twitter pulling on the mask — to say its bluff, obviously, to try. However, the decision does not mean that the dispute between the billionaire and the company he bought could be resolved. And not only does it take a long time for Mask to analyze bots on Twitter, a task that requires a team of researchers who have to create tedious software to review tweets. Most of all, Mask could use his access to the Firehouse API to bring a guess of bot activity on Twitter, making it almost inevitable that his image would not match Twitter’s.
To begin with, the definition of what constitutes a bot account can easily differ from Twitter. Musk can define a bot even if he wants to. Even among the top researchers in the field, there is no universally accepted definition. “If you keep two people at home and ask about the definition of anything, they will have different opinions – and especially on Twitter about the definition of what a bot is,” Murrick said. “So maybe if someone tweets more than 1,000 times a day, he’s a bot, right?” But maybe someone else will say, it should be if they tweet more than 50 times. The best tool for detecting bots, Botometer, Which comes from the Indiana University team, offers only a fair measure of bot activity, giving a probability score that an account is a bot, never a guarantee. With such a shaky house, Musk could probably use the Firehose API to combine whatever decisions are in line with his goal, which, again, seems to be to find some reason to force Twitter to accept a reduced price.
Moreover, it is unclear whether even an honest-to-goodness effort on the part of Musk could completely replicate the Twitter process, in line with its internal conjecture. Specifically, Twitter says that less than 5% of its “monetized daily active users” account bots, an image of Twitter’s own creation. (More often than not, an app will report monthly active users who log in at least once in the last 30 days.) So it is uncertain whether even a goodwill mask can use the Firehouse API to calculate the same number of monetized daily activations. Users
Another issue: What if Musk detects another problem on Twitter via the Firehose API? Brandon Silverman, founder of CrowdTangle, a social media data tool bought by Facebook, noted on Twitter that the platform could make matters worse for itself.
Really, it doesn’t matter if the extra problem is real or fake. All theaters, after all, revolve around make-believe.
