Elon Musk’s now infamous Botometer appears to have flagged his own Twitter account as a bot. The news comes in Twitter’s response to the billionaire’s recent bid to exit the social media platform, which was filed in a 127-page document in Delaware Chancery Court, saying Musk’s claims about robots “compared with evidence and common sense. “
“According to Musk, he was the billionaire founder of multiple companies who, at the advice of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, was tricked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement,” Twitter said in a statement. “The story is as incredible as it sounds and it goes against the truth. It’s just such a story, it’s imagined to escape a merger deal, and Musk is no longer attractive once he’s in the stock market — with the What comes is that his enormous personal wealth — the value — has declined.”
Musk has been defending his attempts to break the agreement with Twitter, challenging the company’s claim that less than 5% of its daily active users are bots. The social media platform noted that Musk used a website to find bots “at least 10 percent of Twitter’s daily active users,” but said “Musk doesn’t measure the same things as Twitter, or even use the same data as Twitter.”
According to Twitter, Musk “could only run a dataset that neither limited nor included daily active users through a common web tool, designating his own Twitter account as a possible bot, resulting in higher estimates. The result is a twist, but Musk hopes it will make waves.” The company went on to describe how Musk used “an internet app called Botometer that uses a different standard than Twitter and made earlier this year. It’s time to identify Musk himself as a very likely robot.”
The site is currently operated by the Indiana University Social Media Observatory and Institute for Cyber Science. Twitter’s court filings say the Botometer “indicates that Musk’s own Twitter account is likely a bot, with a rating of four out of five.” Musk apparently now has a more “human” score. The account gets significantly different values from Botometer on a daily basis, which “highlights how difficult it is to identify bots, especially using only public data.”
Twitter points out that Botometer “doesn’t even claim to apply Twitter’s definition of a fake or spam account. In fact, some bots (such as those that report earthquakes or weather updates when they occur) are often helpful and manipulated on Twitter’s platform. and spam policies are permitted.” The defendants “did not state what score they applied to conclude that an account constituted spam, so their allegations are unsubstantiated.”
Musk’s court documents, on the other hand, say the Botometer has been “improved and honed over the past eight years,” describing how “academic developers of the Botometer tool have published numerous articles about their work, including one Groundbreaking paper with over 1,000 citations in the scholarly literature.”
“Twitter’s complaint, filled with personal attacks on Musk and slick rhetoric directed at media audiences rather than this court, is nothing more than an attempt to distract attention from these false statements,” Musk’s court filing said. According to the billionaire, Twitter is trying to “distract and obfuscate the truth of its disclosures.”
