Stephanie Jones
femaleWell, one good play turn deserves another turn. This happened to Elon Musk.
The richest man in the world has complained over the past few weeks that Twitter is undercounting the number of automated spam bots on its site and doesn’t have access to the data it needs to conduct the independent assessments it needs. It will finalize his acquisition of the company. Twitter estimates that bots make up less than 5% of active accounts, a figure documented in SEC filings over the years. Musk had access to these numbers from the start, so his sudden obsession seemed to create an excuse for renegotiating a $44 billion offer on Twitter amid a sharp decline in tech stocks.
On Monday, Musk’s lawyer sent a concise letter to Twitter saying it was better to hand over the data. Otherwise. Or what? Otherwise, Musk and his attorney will consider their refusal to be a breach of the merger agreement and cancel the transaction. It’s a vague argument that probably won’t hold up in court, but it can be used to offend Twitter.
On Wednesday we learned about the Musk-type movement of Twitter itself. business is Reportedly We are preparing to give him access to the Firehose API, which is a stream of all tweets sent. (Every. Single. Tweet.) This is equivalent to 500 million microblog letters per day. A Twitter spokesperson did not comment on exactly how this information was shared with Musk, but said: We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We plan to close the transaction and execute the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
To be clear, it’s completely overkill for Twitter to give Musk such extensive access. Do you want data? Here is all the data we got! We are not hiding anything. enjoy! “He doesn’t have access to everything. He doesn’t want access to everything,” says Goran Muric, a computer scientist at the USC Institute of Information Sciences who has worked with a similar Twitter API. In fact, Musk would only need a “tenth” API that Twitter provides to some researchers, who account for 10% of all tweets. The difference between the 10 servings and the results collected from the fire hose is the difference between “a survey and a census,” Muric says. Surveys work with a smaller, easier-to-use sample size. “You can always get very accurate results with multiple polls,” Muric said.
Of course, it’s fun to see Twitter pulling Musk over Musk. Ostensibly I would call him his bluff. However, the decision is unlikely to put a meaningful end to a dispute between the billionaire and the company he is likely to acquire. Not only would Musk take a significant amount of time to analyze bots on Twitter, but it would also require a team of researchers who would have to painstakingly build software to review tweets. To the point, Musk can use access to the Firehose API to compute bot activity estimates on Twitter, but it seems almost inevitable that his figures don’t match Twitter.
First, his definition of what constitutes a bot account can very easily differ from Twitter’s. Musk can customize the bot to his liking. There is no universally accepted definition even among the top researchers in the field. “If you put two people in a room and ask about the definition of anything, they’ll have different opinions, especially about the definition of what a bot is on Twitter,” Muric says. “So if someone tweets more than 1,000 tweets per day, he is a bot, right? But someone else will say: It would be nice to tweet more than 50 times.” Best tool for bot identification, botometerProvided by the Indiana University team only provides a rough measure of bot activity and provides a probability score for whether an account is a bot, never sure. Musk, who can be shaken up a lot, will probably use the Firehose API to gather the conclusions that best fit their goals. This again appears to be finding some reason to force Twitter to accept the discounted price.
It’s also unclear whether even a well-meaning effort on the part of Musk can fully replicate Twitter’s process, consistent with internal assumptions. To be precise, Twitter states that bots make up less than 5% of “monetizable daily active users.” (More often apps report monthly active users, i.e. users who have logged on at least once in the last 30 days.) So it’s unclear whether even a well-meaning Musk could use the Firehose API to calculate the same number of monetizable daily active users. do. user. His equation might end up with a different numerator (number of bots) and denominator (daily active users to monetize) than those in Twitter’s arithmetic.
Another issue: What if Musk detects another issue passing through the Firehose API on Twitter? Brandon Silverman, founder of CrowdTangle, a social media data tool acquired by Facebook, pointed out on Twitter that the platform could make things worse.
In fact, it doesn’t matter if the additional issue is real or fake. All plays eventually revolve around the virtual.
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