This article was first featured in Yahoo Finance Tech, a weekly newsletter highlighting our original content on the industry. Get it sent directly to your inbox every Wednesday by 4 p.m. ET. Subscribe

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Getting rid of bots isn't as easy as it sounds

Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter (TWTR) is in purgatory. The brash Tesla (TSLA) CEO put the purchase on hold May 13, saying, on Twitter, of course, that he couldn’t move forward with until he can verify that bots make up 5% or less of the social network’s total user accounts.

The billionaire, and richest person on Earth, has made taking down automated spam and scam bots, not to mention loosening speech moderation, the centerpiece of his buyout campaign. Musk claims that as many as 20% of Twitter’s users could be bots. According to Israeli tech firm Cyabra, bots could make up some 13.7% of Twitter's 229 million total accounts.

But it might be impossible to eliminate bots on Twitter, regardless of who’s in charge.

“I actually don't think it's possible,” explained Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media.

Bots, or simple programs that automate tasks, are largely used to send out quick tweets. These tweets can alert you about a big football game or even let you know the time. But malicious actors can also use bots to scam people out of cryptocurrency or spread disinformation. Countries like Russia have been accused of using bots to spread false information about vaccines and U.S. elections. These malicious bots have ever-evolving ways of evading detection.

“It's an arms race between…us and the bot creators. We might come up with some solutions to identify such types of accounts and then they will try to use evolved techniques…to evade our detection. And then we come up with…some new methods to catch them and then they change their strategy again. We've been seeing this a lot,” Yang said.

In other words, Musk may not be able to get his wish of a bot-free Twitter even if he decides to eventually move forward with the deal again.