With Elon Musk became owner and CEO Twitter, has voted on some of the company’s most far-reaching decisions. For example, the ability to verify a profile through Twitter Blue; unblock accounts that have violated the rules in the past; or even ask the community if he should step down as director of the social network.
The problem is that Elon Musk may not have foreseen that your polls can be manipulated by bots. The tycoon himself, even before the completion of the purchase of Twitter, already assumed that a significant percentage of the activity on the platform is accounted for by bots.
For this reason, it is curious that he never stopped thinking that the bot campaign could influence his poll results. In fact, a report from Accountable Tech (via bloomberg) provides compelling evidence in this regard.
First, the firm mentions that at the moment there is no evidence that the number of bots on Twitter has decreased with the arrival of Elon Musk. But this is not the most disturbing. Due to the fact that a large number of employees left the company either as a result of dismissal or by their own decision, there is no guarantee that the activities of bots are actually monitored and attacked.
“Bots not only thrive thanks to Elon Musk, but also it’s now easier than ever to use them to manipulate Twitter polls.. As long as Musk continues to place major decisions about the platform in the hands of anyone with a few dollars and some free time, Twitter is insecure and open to manipulation by bad actors, including foreign governments,” said Nicole Gill, CEO of Accountable Tech.
Twitter Poll Manipulation Costs a Few Dollars
Of course, they did some experiments to confirm their information. During this month they created a Twitter account @VoxPopuliVoxBotfrom which they launched different types of surveys. Unsurprisingly, they found that bot engagement can be quite high when there is money on hand.
They note that in countries such as Russia and Iran, there are services that offer mass participation in the survey. In exchange for $57, they can get about 26,000 votes. fake in less than a day. Can you imagine what can be done with a big budget and with full confidence that the Twitter security team will do nothing to stop it? This is very disturbing, especially given the polls that Elon Musk has been sharing lately.
However, that person or government interested in changing the results of a survey of this magnitude will need to diversify their money into different services. Why? According to Accountable Tech, it is unlikely that one person can handle such a large volume of votes.
They calculated that in order to really influence the survey using bots, they would have to spend from 2600 to 3600 USD. However, they are still easily payable amounts for institutions or governments. No one can assure us that Elon Musk’s polls are free from these practices.
Twitter and Elon Musk should improve poll security
Services also offer to post responses, become followers, or generate interactions −Like, for example, in some publications. However, Twitter still has the technology to detect when the number of comments or followers is artificially increased.. For polls, unfortunately, there is no such protection, and it seems that Elon Musk and his followers are not going to implement it.
Twitter knows very well that polls can be improved. bloomberg interviewed rolling stones Yoel Roth, who is a former director of security and trust at the social network. The aforementioned admitted that when they developed this feature, they did not know whether to leave the voice anonymous or bind it to the user.
In the end they chose the first option, but that also opened the door to manipulation because any account can cast their vote. How to solve it? One suggestion would be for accounts to meet a minimum age, which would prevent newly created profiles from participating. Solution ideas will not be missing; Another question is whether Elon Musk wants to implement them …
Source: Hiper Textual
