Elon Musk Offers $1 Million Reward To Find Twitter 'Botnets' Culprits
Elon Musk has struck again! This time, the Twitter CEO appears to have offered a bounty to trace the source of "botnets" on the platform.?
For the longest time, Elon Musk has spoken about Twitter's problems and has introduced sweeping changes to Twitter's verification programme, which he claims would eradicate its bot problem.
$1 million bounty?
Now, Musk seems to have offered a bounty $1 million to anyone who manages the find the source of "botnets" after Twitter made some of its algorithms open-source on Friday.
What are botnets, you wonder? These are groups of computers that have been infected with malware and are constantly controlled by a single actor.?
When botnets take over several accounts, they are able to limit the reach of many accounts through mass blocking, unfollowing, and reporting.
"Who is behind these botnets? Million dollar bounty if convicted," Musk wrote on Twitter, after Steven Tey showed how Twitter Blue users get a boost on the platform in a thread analysing the code.
In the same thread, Tey explained how the algorithm can often create "negative feedback loops" that would affect a user's "reputation score" based on reports of abuse or spam - alongside getting muted or blocked.
In a Tweet, user el gato malo suggested to Elon Musk that a reputation score should be considered based on muting, blocking, and reporting emanating from verified accounts.
Besides this, the release of Twitter's open source code has whipped up some interesting insights. For starters, Jane Wong highlighted how Twitter's algorithm specifically labels Musk's tweets, in addition to labelling celebrities like Katy Perry, Barack Obama, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as "testing accounts."
What do you think about Elon Musk's million dollar bounty? Let us know in the comments below.?For more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.
