Bot battle: The tech that could decide Twitter's Musk lawsuit

I can’t help but wonder if Musk keeps bringing up the bot issue because he has had a large number of bot accounts made.

Using bots as an issue to drive the price down.

If Musk looses this, then what will be the impact to Tesla and Space X ? Both organizations are far more important to the World than Twitter, so I wonder, who is really behind this "Take Down" of Musk....

Musk better pony up the money,it will be decided on contract law

Silicon Valley social media platforms such as Facebook/Meta, Twitter and TikTok have all been on a recent recruitment drive of ex-CIA, FBI, NATO and DoD officials to occupy positions in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation. 

They have skills not found too often in the private sector. It is not the threat you imagine. If you want effective cyber security these people already have the necessary skills. If you want people who understand the threat these are who you recruit. It is not the case of any level of government trying to infiltrate these businesses. The businesses are actively recruiting them and offering a lot more money than the government can. These firms have been getting criticized for lax security by the US government. So they hire the experts who have been their harshest critics to help solve the problems.

One solution is to capture every tweet on a specific topic over its period of trending, and then analyse each and every tweet to determine the percentage that is automated.

I do statistics for a living. The problem with your idea is restricting the sample to tweets on a single subject is not a representative sample. You might pick a specific topic that bots have no or very little interest in such as baking cookies or grooming pets. You might also sample a topic that would have an non-representative abundance of bots, say a discussion on the Uyghurs or Taiwan, where the Chinese may be active. To be statistically accurate a representative sample would have to capture tweets from a very broad cross section of subjects.

In the near term this does not bode well for human freedom and self-determination, things that Iain M. Banks held dear even in his AI driven societies.

Silicon Valley social media platforms such as Facebook/Meta, Twitter and TikTok have all been on a recent recruitment drive of ex-CIA, FBI, NATO and DoD officials to occupy positions in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation. Facebook in particular is awash in spooks. It's becoming difficult to tell where American social media ends and the US security state begins, very disturbing news indeed. Musk himself is a Pentagon contractor. Banks would be horrified at what's happening now.

https://techstartups.com/2022/06/22/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-cia-fbi-agents-spies-host-former-intel-officials/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/

The figure would also be tricky for an outsider like Musk to confirm because the bot weeding process can include checking IP or email address or other sensitive user data.

Musk has been said to want to make Twitter a super app like China's WeChat.

Making it an even more aggressive harvester of user data which is valuable for today's machine learning development.

Some AI experts have said the US could fall behind because Chinese apps harvest so much more user data for big data machine learning.

In the near term this does not bode well for human freedom and self-determination, things that Iain M. Banks held dear even in his AI driven societies.

One solution is to capture every tweet on a specific topic over its period of trending, and then analyse each and every tweet to determine the percentage that is automated. That would give you the most representative figure you are likely to get. Social media could move from an excessive dependency upon advertising income if it switched from a star topology to a distributed topology, as bandwidth and storage costs would plummet and oversight would cease to be an issue, users censoring their own feeds as they wished. Sadly, GAFA stopped innovating years ago and the inertia of lawyer-driven corporates is strong. The distributed next generation of all this is there to be done, and anyone building it would replace GAFA. Which is quite a good reason for Musk not to shell out all that cash on a service running with a near-obsolete topology.