Elon Musk has spent the last few weeks complaining that Twitter is underestimating the amount of bots automated from spam on its site and that the social network will not give it access to the data it requires to make an independent assessment, which it needs before it completes its acquisition of the company. Twitter estimates that bots they are less than 5% of active accounts, a figure recorded in many years of SEC filings. Given that Musk was able to access the figure early on, his sudden fixation on it has seemed like an act, a means of fabricating a pretext to renegotiate his $44 billion offer for Twitter amid a broad drop in stock prices. technological actions.
On Monday, Musk’s lawyer sent Twitter a tersely worded letter saying it was best to provide the data. Or else. But? Otherwise, Musk and his lawyers will consider their refusal as a breach of the merger agreement and will cancel the deala dubious argument that probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but could be used to make things nasty for the social network.
On Wednesday, we learned about the Musk-like move of Twitter. The company is reportedly preparing to give you access to its API call firehoseone transmission of each tweet send. That’s about 500 million messages from microblog up to date. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on how exactly he will share this treasure with Musk, saying only: “Twitter has shared and will continue to share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the merger agreement transaction. We believe that this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
To be clear, it’s totally over the top for Twitter to give Musk such wide accessa move meant to tell him: Do you want data? Here is all the data we have. We do not hide anything. Enjoy. “You don’t need access to everything. You don’t want to access everything,” says Goran Muric, a computer scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute who has worked with similar Twitter APIs. In reality, Musk probably just needs the API decahose that the social network makes available to some researchers, which is 10% of all tweets. The difference between the results obtained from the decahose and the firehose It amounts to the difference between “a survey and a census,” says Muric. Surveys work with smaller sample sizes and are easy to use. “Also, you can do multiple surveys all the time and get pretty accurate results” that match what a broader census would produce, says Muric.
It’s certainly amusing to see how Twitter winks at Musk to apparently try to embarrass him. But the decision is unlikely to significantly end the feud between the billionaire and the company he is likely to buy. And not just because It will take Musk a considerable amount of time to analyze the bots and Twittera task that requires a team of researchers who will have to painstakingly build a software to go through them tweets. Even more, while Musk can use his API access from firehose To obtain an estimate of the activity of the bots on Twitter, it seems almost inevitable that their figure will not match Twitter’s.
For starters, your definition of what constitutes an account bot could easily differ from that of Twitter. Musk can define a bot however he wants. There is no universally accepted definition, not even among the best researchers in the sector. “If you put two people in a room and ask them for the definition of anything, they will have a different opinion, and especially about the definition of what a bot on Twitter,” says Muric. “So if someone tweets more than 1,000 tweets in one day, it’s a bot, TRUE? But maybe someone else will say you should be if you tweet more than 50 times.” The best tool to identify botsBotometer, which comes from a team at Indiana University, offers only a rough indicator of the activity of the botsgiving a probability score to know if an account is a botnever a certainty. With so much wiggle room, Musk can probably use the API of firehose to draw the conclusions that best suit their objective, which, again, seems to be to find some reason to force Twitter to accept a reduced price.
Additionally, it’s unclear whether even a good faith effort on Musk’s part could fully replicate Twitter’s process, matching his internal estimate. To be precise, Twitter has said that bots they account for less than 5% of its “monetizable daily active users,” a figure of Twitter’s own creation. (More often, an app will report monthly active users, people who log in at least once in the last 30 days.) Therefore, it is not certain that even a well-intentioned Musk can use the API of firehose to calculate the same number of monetizable daily active users.
Another question: What if Musk detects some other issue on Twitter while going through the Twitter API? firehose? Brandon Silverman, founder of Facebook-acquired social media data tool CrowdTangle, noted on Twitter that the platform may end up making things worse for itself.
