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Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and
by giarc 4y ago
Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.
- lawn 4y agoIn the same way that Elon, and only Elon, can solve self driving.
- emteycz 4y agoBecause he has money and so can easily make everyone listen to him, unlike most other programmers who are stuck behind business/product/finance/management guys.
- dd36 4y agoHe wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.
- malfist 4y agoHow does charging for a checkmark prevent bots? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not a twitter user, but typically, aren't bots not verified?
- dd36 4y agoThe idea is that you can filter out the unpaid.
- XorNot 4y agoHow many accounts are needed to meaningfully influence a Twitter story? How much can you charge for a checkmark that people will pay for? Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee. There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it). It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoWhat if it cost $2 a month plus a scanned copy of a government-issued ID?
- sangnoir 4y agoGovernments can generate IDs for thier sock-puppets for online influence campaigns. Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required). Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? 1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
- Jensson 4y agoNow you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. So this might not solve all spam, but it would probably solve 99.9% of it. > Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
- sangnoir 4y ago> Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
- nindalf 4y agoIt’s possible to generate realistic looking IDs. It’s not that hard, any person reading this comment can do it. Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source. It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done. For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible. What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
- wutbrodo 4y agoI still don't underatand why paying would help. Wouldn't simply filtering out the unverified work the same way?
- lrae 4y agoThey aren't. There are sometimes hacked verified accounts being abused, and I guess charging for the checkmark would result in less verified accounts and thus less hacked accounts... but bit of a reach :) Those are also not really the problem.
- rdtwo 4y agoSend them a 2fa key token with their fee and call it a day
- DrBoring 4y agoOnce upon a time, I was on a dev team which had to share an RSA 2FA token for accessing a client's VPN. Rather than pass it around to whoever needed it, we just pointed a webcam at it.
- itsoktocry 4y ago>He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts. What makes you think users want any of this? Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.
- shiftpgdn 4y agoGo follow all the big crypto/NFT accounts on a fresh twitter account. You'll be able to see all of the easily solved bot abuse.
- dd36 4y agoElon said this. I don’t know what anyone else is saying. He must think it will work?
- jimkleiber 4y agoI've often thought that if they 1) allow anyone to verify their account and 2) let verified accounts choose to only (or mainly) interact with other verified accounts, it can make it more obvious which accounts are anonymous or bots. I think it should work unless/until the anonymous and bot accounts figure out how to break the KYC process.
- dd36 4y agoRight. It’s like removing spam. Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real. It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.
- jimkleiber 4y agoI remember reading an article where the CEO of Myspace said one of the main reasons Facebook won was because of its real name policy. <edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]: > Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-101300285.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1... [1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verify-more-users-towards-a-more-human-web-9b7975aac414 https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif... </edit> I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts. I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.
- XorNot 4y agoWho is going to pay? There's at most a few tens of thousands of people who care about their identity being verified on Twitter (because they're journalists, company leaders, politicians). How much is Twitter worth to those people? Probably not $10,000 per year, so we're talking about a very limited additional revenue source. For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.
- dd36 4y agoWhatsApp charged a few dollars a year and did fine. I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage. It’s like paying for the removal of commercials. I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified. I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.
- qwytw 4y agoTwitter has over 7000 employees, for WhatsApp's business model to work they'd need to cut this by 10x or so and there is no way they justify the 45 billion valuation if they do that.
- dd36 4y agoHuh? I’m not following. Why would this hurt revenue? Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.
- yywwbbn 4y agoDid WhatsApp have Ads? I thought all their income was from subscriptions? If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.
- dd36 4y agoI do not believe they are literally applying the WhatsApp model. The point was that small amounts of money are tolerable in a network effect.
- misiti3780 4y agoI find this to be a great idea personally. I will totally give Twitter a few bucks a month for less bot BS and a blue checkmark.
- neurobot123 4y agoYep, as long as they restore Trump and BabylonBee i might give Twitter another try
- sangnoir 4y ago...and your government ID?
- misiti3780 4y agohuh?
- dymk 4y agoYou give the grocery store your government ID when you buy oreos?
- pueblito 4y agoWell there are the cameras in the parking lot logging my license plate, facial recognition tracking my course through the store on the way to get the cookies and to pay for them, probably at a self-checkout terminal with a camera right in your face. Then you pay for it with your Visa and that Oreo (automatically capitalized by my iPhone) purchase data is sold by Visa. Then that data gets consolidated with the data secured from Verizon and their Custom Experience badged reading of your text messages. Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants. I feel it’s fair to say we do.
- Starlevel001 4y agoDamn, now it'll be even more of a good idea to immediately block every bluecheck.
- fooqux 4y ago1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. 2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded. If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.
- dannyw 4y agoRetailers didn't really care. A sale is a sale, and scalpers are less likely to return or ask for a refund.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoThey care a little, because establishing relationships with (and gathering data on) real customers is more valuable than having single entities hoovering up all the supply. Further, real people often buy more than one item. I'm sure you've noticed retailers putting limits on specific items before.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago> Further, real people often buy more than one item. But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.
- dd36 4y agoI agree with dannyw. Also, Twitter influencing requires scale. You can fake some but patterns will emerge that make it harder and harder. Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
- nicolas_t 4y ago1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.
- mostertoaster 4y agoSomeone might’ve said, how is Elon going to make space flight far more affordable? I have no idea, but he’s a better bet than most other folks I’d say. Will he succeed? I’d bet not, but I can’t think of someone better to try.
- soabeb 4y agoNo, they haven’t been trying to solve the problem. They want the bots on there for financial and political reasons. It is easy to solve the problem - require identification to use the site. I mentioned the advantages of social media doing this about 10 years ago and was downvoted on this very website because of “privacy and anonymity on the internet is great!”.
- interblag 4y agoJust to note, there are many reasons to not want to "require identification to use the site" that aren't related to "[wanting] bots on there". Cost, friction, safety/protection, etc. - the list gets quite long with a trivial brainstorm. Also note: that's not the same thing as saying "Twitter shouldn't require identification to register" (though personally I don't think that it should). It's just to say that it's WAY more complicated than "bots vs. ID".
- wollsmoth 4y agoI do think that would work but I think twitter probably could detect bot actions if they wanted to in a more nuanced way. Swarms of new accounts making similar comments has to be detectable on their end.
- comboy 4y agoPrivacy and anonymity are great and it doesn't even solve the problem until your ID is associated with some form of public key in every country. Why is this comment not signed with your full name? How do you feel about inevitable leaks and your identity being stolen?
- evandale 4y ago>why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem To me it seems that he's the only one who wants to.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EricE 4y agoBingo. Google and everyone else makes money on volume, not quality of content. They don’t care if the majority of the volume of content is garbage as long as they get their clicks/impressions on ads.
- matthew40 4y ago
- dimitrios1 4y agoReposting this because unsure why it was flagged, as it is perfectly valid and based in objective reality: They (twitter) remove a lot of volume because it doesn't fit with their political narrative, even though this is financially detrimental to them.
- jfk13 4y agoWhat's "a lot" of volume in the context of this claim? Do you have a source for the proportion of would-be active tweeters they block, or proportion of tweets they take down, or anything like that?
- dimitrios1 4y agoIn this case you don't even need a source. You just need to have your head out of the sand, but outside of that, you can look at all the users who have left the platform or became entirely inactive after Donald Trump was banned, then look at the surge of users the alternative Twitter platforms gained, and pretty much make a safe assumption they lost at least that. You can also take a look at Twitter's stock price in Jan 2021, where it was close to 77 dollars, and rising at the time, and compare it to the pre-Elon hype price of 39 dollars, with Goldman rating it as being closer to 30 dollars in true value.
- tomp 4y agoElon has the ability (and motivation) to look beyond next quarter. Bots increase “monthly active users” metric, so short-term thinking management likes them. Elon can afford to think long-term.
- giarc 4y agoTwitters stock price has been flat since IPO... I think the board and shareholders have been ok with them thinking long-term seeing as how they have 0 returns.
- EricE 4y agoThe board barely owns any stock, and all collect a pretty healthy salary for basically doing nothing. I think I saw Elon tweet eliminating the board would save $3M a year and looking at the chart of board members and their payments it seems about right. Judging by their past actions they were far more interested in using Twitter as a propaganda platform than worrying about it making money.
- dqpb 4y agoMeta answer: the ultimate point of money is that it gives you the opportunity to make decisions without convincing everyone that you deserve to make decisions.
- eagerpace 4y agoTaking Twitter private will give him more flexibility to implement structural changes to the business which may take time to see returns.
- twox2 4y agoI don't really think they are trying to solve this problem as much as being reactive to complaints.
- antattack 4y agoI can think of couple of reasons: 1. as a public company, they are afraid to lose so many accounts - see Netflix as an example on what could happen to their stock 2. bots are the future, at some point I think everyone will have a bot to post for them
- ehnto 4y agoGenuine curiosity, what would someone have a bot post for them that they wouldn't post for themselves? I can think of edge cases, and genuinely good use cases, but what is the general purpose use you're thinking of that would see everyone use one?
- antattack 4y agoSome wars for public opinion, are lost and won on social media. Those who post quickest have a higher chance of not getting lost in the noise and that is where bots will probably be used first by individuals as well. With that said, hopefully this not the future and new ways of moderating and presenting information will be invented, but the way things are now, it's a slug-fest and the fastest and loudest often wins.
- Avicebron 4y agoI'm genuinely curious as to why you think the bot would be posting "faster" to someone's opinion or statement than a person who can read the statement and respond as fast as they can type.. I can see people setting up some form of pre-loaded opinion/responses based on what they want to be seen as..e.g. if $OPINION_I_DISLIKE print $YOU_BAD else print $YOURE_RIGHT! but that seems like it's pretty limited as to completely not work in practical human communication
- Chico75 4y agoWhy would you want to have a bot post for you? Once we have general AI available, there will be much better applications than posting for you on social networks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoTikTok does a pretty good job with its ridiculous security ecosystem hyperfocused on prohibiting any third-party clients. APIs need to use actual headless browsers in order to generate the appropriate signature.[1] Maybe s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶4̶3̶B̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶i̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ the rise in valuation, and Elon's involvement, can bring in some more money for the company itself for these kinds of endeavors. https://github.com/davidteather/TikTok-Api https://github.com/davidteather/TikTok-Api
- karatinversion 4y agoThe 43B goes to Twitter's shareholders in exchange for their shares (and financiers who arrange the deal), not Twitter itself.
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoVery true, that's my bad. Hopefully the rise in valuation, and Elon's involvement, can bring in some more money for the company itself for these kinds of endeavors.
- Sol- 4y agoOn the contrary, Twitter is going to be saddled with some debt that will be used to finance the takeover. But perhaps this doesn't matter to Musk.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThis makes automated posting difficult, but not sock-puppeting. When people say "bots", they probably don't mean automated posting, they mean creating lots of accounts to swarm other users with. You don't need much automation to do this; a device farm of old phones and some ability to remote-control each one would be enough to maintain hundreds to thousands of sock-puppets.
- andai 4y agoInteresting, I wonder if VMs would also work for this purpose?
- Octoth0rpe 4y ago> Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? I don't think _only_ Elon can solve this problem, but one way of looking at the problem is that Twitter appears to be hesitant to 'solve' the bot problem because their most important metric that drives stock price is the number of engaged users, which includes bots. Taking twitter private (is this actually what Elon is doing? I haven't been following very closely) potentially removes the need to focus on this metric, freeing them to 'solve' the bot problem and not worry about the effect on the stock price when the # of engaged users drops by 40%.
- brightball 4y agoEverything I've read says he's taking it private. Yes.
- mjr00 4y agoI worked for a social media management app company (Sprinklr/Hootsuite/Sprout-esque) and we had the exact same problem. My ballpark estimate is that at least 90% of the messages that went through our system were extremely obvious spam or scams. However, there was a huge focus on MAU growth, so there was no way in hell we were going to attempt to combat this. For legacy implementation reasons, the backend service that published messages to Twitter would lose 1-2 queued messages every time the service was redeployed. Bleakly, the engineering team decided to not consider this a major issue, despite it being a core competency of the platform. It was simply extremely unlikely anything of value was being lost.
- thomasahle 4y agoDid you try to introduce a new measure "MAU excluding bots"? Then over time the company could refocus around that and better policies be made
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoThat seems like a good idea, but I suspect introducing a "MAU excluding bots" metric would look to investors like a sudden drop in MAU by 90%.
- kansface 4y agoPart of the answer has to be that companies don’t want to solve it because it would destroy metrics that buoy ad prices. Charge per tweet or per account and the problem would be gone overnight.
- max599 4y agoTwitter is not "trying to solve this problem", they are embracing it and benefiting from it. They are strongly incentivised to keep the bots because it gives them a massive boost in their number of active users and the valuation of their company. I don't think this would ever change unless they go private with someone that has no intention of selling it. I have no idea how successful Elon would be at removing them, but at least he intend to try to do it.
- te_chris 4y agoElon isn't paying for this out of his own pocket. He's not transferring it to some perpetual trust a la the Guardian and the Scott Trust. He's taking it private but there will still be pressure from everyone he's raised money from to make sure they make good. Mostly, I think this is going to end up being one of the most expensive acts of individual hubris in history. It's strange from someone whose other notable projects have such clear goals. "Moar free speech lmao" doesn't sound measureable, let alone achievable while also making bank.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago"one of the most expensive acts of individual hubris in history" is what people have been saying about everything Elon does for a while now.
- dhc02 4y agoThe money he's secured is mostly loans, not venture capital, so that sort of pressure to grow or pad numbers should indeed be diminished.
- randcraw 4y agoBloomberg mentioned two loans to cover the shortfall in his equity swap (one external and one drawn on his Tesla stock), with annual interest payments in the ballpark of $1B each. So Twitter's take home pay just lost $2B of the $4B it nets annually. Losing further market share by re-engineering retweet algorithms to be kinder/gentler looks like a better bet to bury Twitter than raise it. But mature media giants are supposed to lose money, right?
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoHe has experience with it but he's not the only one. I'm sure Max Levchin would be very capable of putting together a team and fighting off the bots. Combating fraud was a key technical challenge in building PayPal and bad actors on that network had more direct financial incentives to write them because PayPal was transmitting money rather than social updates.
- cguess 4y agoWhat experience does he have with it? He's a capitalist, not a sociologist, programmer or even economist.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cloutchaser 4y ago[flagged]
- cguess 4y ago[flagged]
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoMusk was CEO of PayPal and definitely has a deep background in programming. He made his initial fortune through writing video games and then another software startup called Zip2 (a forerunner of Map Quest and Google Maps). Levchin was PayPal's CTO and is also deeply technical.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoI thought he made his initial fortune by being the son of the owner of an emerald mine in Zambia[0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...
- anonuser123456 4y agoMost large companies have trouble breaking out of a local maximum. The incentives align to just keep climbing the gradient and never go down. Elon has the cash + clout to solve the problem. Is he unique in the ability to solve it? No. But he may be in a unique position to solve it.
- comboy 4y agoI don't think that he and only he can solve the bot problem, but with question stated this way - Tesla may currently have the best machine learning hardware on the planet. With people reports + second wave of hired people for marking what is spam and what is not, this seems like a fantastic place to shine for ML - especially when you have all accounts data and full graph available. I would not bet on it - as far as I understand it, fighting spam is like 95% of what engineers at Twitter do and openly available ML on GPUs seem plenty strong - but it is a possibility.
- RaymondDeWitt 4y agoBecause it's almost impossible to differentiate between a person posting a tweet and a bot doing the same. There is nothing humans do on Twitter than bots cannot automate.
- wutbrodo 4y agoIf this were truly the case, then bots wouldn't be a problem! More narrowly, I buy that this is true for some segment of the tweeting population. I know this is provocative, but removing those false positives from Twitter may be a good thing. I have a Twitter account that I use very casually (1 tweet/month, maybe), and I'm 100% sure that my activity is not replicable by a bot. I'd no longer call myself an expert, but I used to work in conversational AI and have kept up with the research. The latest language models are incredibly exciting, but they're still not at the level where they can simulate a non-braindead tweeter. The above is more of an amusing thought experiment than an actually-feasible approach. Aggressive removal of botlike users would have to be opaque enough that it'd cut against the free speech objective that Musk has been promoting. But I will say that, at a smaller-scale, the best communities I've ever participated in have had incredibly strong content neutrality norms alongside robustly-enforced civility norms.
- zenron 4y agoIf Twitter wanted to solve the problem they would have. Simple as that. Elon is the one who is putting his money where his mouth is to get the company to tackle the issues plaguing the company.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoThe problem is not a software issue others can't solve but Elon's team. It's a cultural issue that the current Twitter team accepted in their comfort zone because it fits their bias (that does not defend freedom of speech).
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoThe only software devs that in a reasonable position to solve the problem work at large social media companies, and those companies are financially incentivized to not solve the problem. I don't think this is a software capability issue.
- cultofmetatron 4y agothe bot problem can be solved if there's political will. Elon's power isn't being the guy who solves the problem (though he is pretty good at tackling technical issues directly), Its creating the political will to solve problems other people find intractable and clearing a path and providing resources for smart people to solve it. frankly I'm jelous and wish I could do that.
- JoshCole 4y agoHe isn't the only one who can solve the bot problem.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoMy amateur opinion is that it's not very difficult but it hurts subscriber count, clicks, engagement metrics etc. If he takes Twitter private there will be incentive to fix this because there won't be shareholders to please. On the other hand, why are bots not considered a result of free speech? I'm not free to run hogwild on your platform with bots? That's censorship!
- gmadsen 4y agobecause its not a technical problem. its a political problem
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- harambae 4y agoThe prevailing opinion on HN seems to be that it can't be solved. Of course, less than a week ago the prevailing opinion on HN was that Elon wasn't serious about buying Twitter, and didn't have the money, and it was all fake and part of a pump-and-dump Just see the top comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109355
- bengale 4y agoIt also seems an odd thing for him to be solving since a lot of the marketing noise for his companies is bot driven. Perhaps he's more interested in "solving" the problem in specific ways. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-off-the-twitter-board-of-directors-the-tesla-twitter-bot-army-marches-on https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
- dang 4y ago(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154051. We detached it to prune the thread, which was getting too top-heavy.)
- bezospen15 4y agoLol Elon has no interest in solving a bot problems. Elon wants to allow the alt right back in Twitter after they've been banned and failed to start a rival competition. This is the official death of Twitter.
- ThePhysicist 4y agoIf you talk about social bots influencing opinions that's a problem that doesn't seem to exist, or at least gets vastly exaggerated. Here's an interesting paper from a German scholar who investigated this and wasn't able to reproduce any of the findings of other research in that area. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? He can't and he is unlikely to want to.