The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

A28 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022

BY JOSEPH MENN

AND ELIZABETH DWOSKIN

san francisco — When Elon
Musk tweeted Friday that his deal
to buy Twitter was “on hold” as he
looked into the extent of Twitter’s
bot problem, he was poking an
open wound at the social media
company.
Twitter’s challenges with bots
and fake accounts have been
around as long as the 16-year-old
platform. In 2016, a Russian troll
farm used more than 50,000 bots
to try to sway the outcome of the
presidential election, and Twitter
executives have promised to fix
the issue. But even as experts
agree with the company that it’s
made significant progress in
eliminating more fake and spam
accounts than ever, they say arti-
ficial intelligence advances are
spinning up new ones that are
ever harder to detect.
None of that should have been
a surprise for Musk, who tweeted
that he was pausing the deal
“pending details supporting cal-
culation that spam/fake accounts
do indeed represent less than 5%
of users.” (He later said he was
still committed to the $44 billion
takeover, and some investors said
they thought Musk was angling
for a lower price that would not
weigh as heavily on the Tesla
shares he has pledged as loan
collateral.)
Musk was referring to a Twitter
regulatory filing this month that
said false or spam accounts con-
stituted fewer than 5 percent of
its 229 million daily active users.
The number is hardly new:
Twitter has been giving the same
estimate for years, even though
critics and experts have said they
believe the company is lowballing
the actual number of such ac-
counts.
“That 5 percent is a very oppor-
tune and chosen metric,” said a
former employee who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to not
alienate a former employer.
“They didn’t want it to be big, but
also not small, because then they
could get caught in a lie.”
Twitter declined to comment
for this story. A person familiar
with the acquisition negotiations,
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to describe sensitive
matters, said the negotiations
were proceeding as usual, despite
Musk’s claims of a hold. The

person said requests to learn

more about spam and fake ac-

counts were routine for a poten-

tial acquirer of a social media

business.

Twitter’s history with spam

goes as far back as its 2013 public

offering, when it disclosed the

risk of automated accounts — a

problem faced by all social media

companies. (Facebook has also

estimated that fake profiles ac-

count for about 5 percent of its

user base.) For years, people

wanting to manipulate public

opinion could buy hundreds of

fake accounts to pump up a celeb-

rity or a product’s standing.

But the problem took a grave

turn in 2016, when Russian oper-

atives from the Internet Research

Agency sowed disinformation

about the election to millions of

people in favor of then-pre-

sidential candidate Donald

Trump, on Twitter, Facebook,

YouTube and other platforms.

The Russia controversy, which

culminated with congressional

hearings in 2017, prompted Twit-

ter to crack down. By 2018, the

company had launched an initia-

tive called Healthy Conversations

and was culling more than a

million fake accounts a day from

its platform, The Washington

Post reported at the time.

To tackle the problem internal-

ly, Twitter engineers launched an

internal initiative called Opera-

tion Megaphone, in which they

bought hundreds of fake ac-

counts and studied their behav-

ior.

“You grab a species and find

others that behave like that spe-

cies,” said a person familiar with

the internal effort, speaking on

the condition of anonymity to

freely describe it. The person said

they thought the 5 percent was

probably an underestimate.

“You’re making predications

based on what you’ve observed,

but you don’t know what you

don’t know.”

Critics have argued that Twit-

ter has an incentive to downplay

the number of fake accounts on

its platform and that the bot

problem is far worse than the

company admits. The company

also allows some automation of

accounts, such as news aggrega-

tors that pass along articles about

specific topics or weather reports

at set times or postings of photos

every hour.

Twitter does not include auto-

mated accounts in its calcula-

tions of daily active users because

those accounts do not view adver-

tising, and it argues that all social

media services have some

amount of spam and fake ac-

counts.

But the 5 percent number has

long raised eyebrows among out-

side researchers who conduct

deep studies of behavior on the

platform around critical issues

including public health and poli-

tics.

“Whether it was covid, or many

elections studies in the U.S. and

other countries, or around vari-

ous movies, we see way more than

that number of bots,” said Kath-

leen Carley, a computer science

professor at Carnegie Mellon who

directs the university’s Center for

the Computational Analysis of

Social and Organizational Sys-

tems.

“In all of the different studies

we have done collectively, the

number of bots ranges: We have

seen as low as 5 percent, and we

have seen as high as 35 percent.”

Carley said the proportion of

bots tends to be much higher on

topics where there is a clear

financial goal, such as promoting

a product or a stock, or a clear

political goal, such as electing a

candidate or encouraging dis-

trust and division.

There are also very different

types of bots, including basic

promotional spam, nation-state

accounts and amplifiers for com-

mercial hire.

Rapidly developing technology

allows geopolitical forces to seem

more human, peppering their

comments with personal asides,

and to try to manipulate the flow

of group conversations and opin-

ions.

As an example, Carley said

some pro-Ukraine bots were en-

gaging in dialogue with groups

normally focused on other issues

to try to build coalitions support-

ing Ukrainian goals. “The num-

ber of bot technologies has gone

up, and the cost of creating a bot

has gone down,” she said.

Outsiders said it was very diffi-

cult for them to produce a good

estimate of bot traffic with the

limited help Twitter provides to

research efforts.

“When we use our Botometer

tool to evaluate a group of ac-

counts, the result is a spectrum

ranging from very humanlike to

very bot-like,” said Kaicheng

Yang, a doctoral student at Indi-

ana University.

“In between are the so-called

cyborgs controlled both by hu-

mans and software. We will al-

ways mistake bots for humans

and humans for bots, no matter

where we draw the line.”

Twitter gives some researchers

access to a giant number of

tweets, known inside the compa-

ny as the “fire hose” for its im-

mense volume and speed. But

even that does not have the clues

that would make identifying bots

easier, such as the email address-

es and phone numbers associated

with the accounts behind each

tweet.

“Pretty much every effort out-

side of Twitter to detect ‘botness’

is fatally flawed,” said Alex Sta-

mos, the former Facebook secu-

rity chief who leads the Stanford

Internet Observatory.

Twitter itself does not do near-

ly as much as it could to hunt

down and eliminate bots, two

former employees told The Post.

But two other former employees

told The Post that after 2018, the

company acted far more aggres-

sively.

Some of the people speculated

that financial incentives motivate

Twitter to not find them. If the

company identifies more bots

and removes them, the number of

“monetizable daily average users”

would go down, the amount it

could charge for advertising

would also decline and the stock

price would follow, as it did after

Twitter confirmed a big cull to

The Post in 2018.

The company uses a number of

programs to seek out and block

automated commercial accounts,

but they are most effective at

catching the obvious spammers,

such as those that register hun-

dreds of new accounts on the

same day from the same device,

the former employees said.

To produce its quarterly bot

estimate, the company looks at a

sample of millions of tweets.

But that is a tiny percentage of

the total, and they are from a

wide spectrum — not the hot-but-

ton issues that draw the most

spam and the most viewer im-

pressions.

“They honestly don’t know,”

the former employee said. “There

was significant resistance to do-

ing any meaningful quantifica-

tion.”

Twitter has protected itself le-

gally with a disclaimer in its

quarterly reports saying it could

be off by a lot.

“We applied significant judg-

ment, so our estimation of false or

spam accounts may not accurate-

ly represent the actual number of

such accounts, and the actual

number of false or spam accounts

could be higher than we have

estimated,” Twitter said in its

latest quarterly report.

Musk’s question about bots and fake accounts is nothing new for Twitter

HANNIBAL HANSCHKE/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

E lon Musk said he was still committed to the $44 billion takeover of Twitter even though earlier saying

the deal was “on hold” as he investigated the extent of the platform’s bot problem.

“When we use our Botometer tool to evaluate a

group of accounts, the result is a spectrum ranging

from very humanlike to very bot-like.”

Kaicheng Yang, doctoral student at Indiana University

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