Elon Musk Will Remove 'Spam Bots' From Twitter, But Also Half Of His Followers

Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist and the new owner of Twitter wants to get rid of the platform's bot problem. If you use Twitter on the daily, you would probably understand the pain of "spam bots" on the platform that bomb people's content with inappropriate content.

While Elon Musk's ambitious goal to remove Twitter bots does sound fruitful, it appears that Elon Musk would lose at least half of his followers if spam bots were magically wiped off Twitter.

According to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, half of Elon Musk's 88.4 million followers on Twitter are not real people, i.e., they're spam bots - automated accounts that are designed to send spam to a large number of people on online forums like Twitter.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk called spam bots the "single most annoying problem" on Twitter. When his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter went through, he promised to weed out spam bot accounts.

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What will Musk do about bots?

"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans," Musk said in a statement after buying Twitter.

Also read:?Twitter Users Deactivate In Hordes And EU Issues Warning After Elon Musk Takeover

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Spam bots can be extremely dangerous. Most automated accounts on Twitter are built to spread misinformation, to engage in malicious activity, and to scam people through money-making schemes. After crypto showed up, spam bots regularly use dubious links to empty crypto savings of people. "If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion Dogecoin," TIME quoted Elon Musk as saying.

Also read:?Mixed Signals: Jeff Bezos Trolls Then Praises Elon Musk After Twitter Acquisition

What does Musk want to do? He wants to authenticate "all real humans" on twitter, even though it's unclear how he intends to do this. SparkToro estimates that roughly 48% of Musk's followers are fake, "unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter)."

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What do you think about Musk's plans for a bot-free Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.?For more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.?

References

McCluskey, M. (2022, April 28). Elon Musk Wants to Rid Twitter of “Spam Bots.” Nearly Half His Followers Are Fake. Time. https://time.com/6171726/elon-musk-fake-followers/