This fall will be so fun, with the start of the NFL season and something that could be even more thrilling and action-packed; the Delaware trial when Elon Musk squares off against Twitter in a lawsuit to determine who will own the social media company.
Musk backed out of the deal in July, claiming Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal is either really stupid or really full of crap by saying that just 5% of Twitter’s accounts are fake and non-human bots.
One expert says that the number of bogus accounts is actually a staggering 80%. Dan Woods is the head of cyber security for F5, and his job is to analyze bot traffic, so he’s not exactly biased and isn’t prone to hyperbole.
Musk responded to a story posted on Twitter by The australian.com about Woods’ findings and had a simple and succinct reply of “Sure sounds higher than 5%!”
Here’s part of the wording in the official July filing from Musk’s attorneys where he pulled his offer to buy the company.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”
Earlier this month, Musk challenged Agrawal to a public debate about the bot situation. Yeah, Agrawal wasn’t exactly up to that challenge.
Here’s what Woods said in the Australian story about how he came to his conclusion. He said he created a fan Twitter account and then purchased over 100,000 fake Twitter followers. Twitter followers.
“I’m not a programmer, but I watched YouTube, and in a weekend I wrote a script that automatically creates accounts on Twitter without encountering any obstacles. There’s huge demand [for bots], there’s a marketplace to serve that demand, and if I can write a bot that creates accounts on Twitter, and I’m not even a programmer, imagine what a sophisticated programmer could do. Twitter doesn’t want (its number of bots) to be that high, so they’re going through the motions of canceling some accounts.”
“I’m not saying they’re lying, but we’ve really studied these accounts and we’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot more fake accounts than Twitter is letting on.”
Is there a different definition of the word “lying” in Australia?
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