Twitter’s Musk puts on hold $44 billion takeover plan on hold

On Friday, Reuters put on hold his $44 billion-takeover plan for Twitter Inc, as he waited for details on the microblogging platform's claim that fake accounts comprise less than 5% of users.

Musk, who has made weeding out fake Twitter accounts and spam bots the central theme of his takeover plan, said if he buys the social-media platform, he will defeat the spam bots or die trying.

Twitter, like other social media companies, has been battling spam bots for the past few years through software that spots and blocks them.

What is a fake Twitter account? What is a spam bot?

Spam bots or fake accounts are designed to manipulate or artificially boost activity on social media platforms such as Twitter.

Accounts on the platform engage in bulk, aggressive or deceptive activities that misleads people, and these activities are considered platform manipulation, according to the company's policy.

Overlapping accounts that share similar content, mass registration of accounts, using automated or coordinated accounts to create fake engagements and trading in followers are listed as violations of Twitter's spam policy.

A survey conducted across four countries showed that the biggest user concern was the existence of too many bots or fake accounts. Twitter has a team that identifies real people and robots on its platform. The company uses machine learning to recognize patterns of malicious activity.

The algorithms challenge 5 million to 10 million accounts per week.

Parody, newsfeed, commentary, and fan accounts are allowed in the bio, provided they disclose the nature of the account.

If Twitter detects a fake account, it may lock the account or seek verification. In case of multiple accounts, the user may be asked to keep one.

Twitter thinks that all bots are bad and has launched a label to tag the good ones.

Who doesn't love a handful of robots who promise not to rise up against us? The company's Twitter Safety handle was tweeted in September last year.

Automated accounts can share useful information such as updates on COVID 19 updates and traffic.

Tamer Hassan, CEO of HUMAN, said that knowing who's real is essential to the integrity of the internet.

Most companies are trying not to lose when it comes to managing the threat that sophisticated bots pose to organizations. Defensive strategies focus on minimizing damage rather than playing to win. Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, wants Twitter to be a forum for free speech, which he believes is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and sees spam bots as a threat to this idea.

In a recent TedX interview, Musk said that his top priority was to remove bot armies on Twitter, calling out bots that promote cripto-based scams on Twitter.

They make the product worse. If I had a Doge coin for every scam I saw, we'd have 100 billion Doge coin.