Elon Musk has no end The attempted takeover of Twitter has taken another strange turn, as the social media platform appears to have agreed to the entrepreneur’s request to access a “firehose of” internal data held by the company.
For weeks, Musk has pressed Twitter to provide data that would allow the South African entrepreneur to test whether a significant share of the platform’s users are fake bot accounts — something he says would lower the price he would be willing to pay for the company. Musk claims bot accounts make up more than 5 percent of Twitter’s user base — something even Musk’s critics believe is true — and wants the company to refute that.
Twitter reported a lower number of inauthentic accounts in its financial results and according to The Washington Posthe is willing to give Musk access to every tweet posted daily, along with detailed user information to allow him to look for inauthentic behavior. (Informally, this data is called a “firehose.” Twitter declined WIRED’s request to confirm or deny Publish report.) Twitter’s apparent willingness to grant Musk access to the data stream comes days after the suitor’s lawyers sent a letter to the company saying it was “actively resisting and thwarting [Musk’s] information rights” and threatens to withdraw from the deal.
The reported change to give Musk access to the data is significant and raises two key questions: First, will Musk get what he wants from the data he’s been given? And second: what does its access mean for the privacy and security of everyday users?
For Axel Bruns, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology, the move is Twitter, which he calls Musk’s bluff. “By giving him access to the firehose, Twitter could probably say, ‘Then prove your claims about the abundance of bots,'” he says. Bruns believes Musk and whoever he hires to track bots will have a tough time. But even for someone with the necessary skills to handle this level of data, this is unlikely to be the correct method to answer the question. It’s uncertain whether access to the firehose of 500 million tweets posted on the social media platform each day will actually help Musk answer the key question he claims is holding up his Twitter purchase: the share of users who are bots. “It seems a bit performative,” says Paddy Leersen, a researcher in information law at the University of Amsterdam. “My feeling is that this data is not the data you need to know who is a bot or not.”
The ability to determine what a bot does is a hotly debated topic in academia, to which experts have devoted much of their working life – which is why they are skeptical that access to all tweets posted on Twitter will answer the question definitively enough of the bot to convince Musk to go ahead with the purchase. “My impression is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is to detect bots,” says Leerssen. “A tool like this [the fire hose] it won’t let you do that unless you combine it with all sorts of other research methods. I don’t think that’s something that, in a timeline like this, Elon Musk would have time for.” The person who could answer how this data would help him identify bots, Musk himself, did not respond to an emailed request for comment. .
