Elon Musk is displaying his first-principle assessment approach to the ‘twitter bot’ problem.
Let’s first examine the why, the motivations for the takeover are altruistic in nature. Elon suggests that Twitter has become the ‘New Town Square’ where discussions on a vast number of topics can take place. The discourse has taken us down some light and some dark places but if you believe in free speech then both the views of the light and dark are valid. The Twitter algorithm operates in a way that amplifies some messages and mutes others in a closed source manner thus taking away the ability of the ‘town square’ to hear all sides of a discussion. I agree, it’s happened to me and in Musks assessment he believes that the algorithm should be open sourced for all to see how and why some tweets are amplified. The more nuanced thinking here is tough for some people accept so before anyone says that some views should be banned, note the approach is an attempt to protect free speech where that speech is acceptable within the law. Or in plain words peoples right to free speech should be protected where it is lawful to say those things. The challenge has been who gets to amplify their message above others? THIS is what Elon is going after. Now with that out the way here is my take on the bot problem that clearly exists on Twitter.
So the big reveal which is not important is that I have several bots currently running on Twitter all of which have their own API interface to the developer portal and automated initiation protocols. All of which have been through the ‘App Review’ process and subsequently approved by Twitter themselves. I have been building and maintaining bots on Twitter since 2013 through the Twitter Developer Program. On several occasions as the Twitter developer program has depreciated some of its methods all my bots have required an update. Before anyone asks as to whether i am a deep state operative.
The bots have several purposes:
- Collecting data. How many times is a thing mentioned and over what period?
- Replying to messages of new followers. ‘Hi, thanks for the follow.’
- Tweeting my location when required. ‘Just landed, see you soon’.
- Retweeting important things as a kind of memory bank.
The learning curve is very steep when starting out but a simple Python framework can get anyone up to speed on the creating and the maintaining of bots for zero cost. This is the problem and Elon knows this. The ability to create and maintain bots on twitter is free and because of this the $8 per. month makes sense. Eventually anyone without a verified mark would be a low effort bot account. I certainly wont be paying the additional $8 for every bot I have created but will be doing so for my own account and this limiting my ability to roll out bot that have the ability to create noise in the network.
I think Elon has executed a long term strategy with his acquisition – the premise of a public company is to ensure that it is able to generate future cash flows and how many of my bots have bought a toaster? Not one, they can butter the toast, yet ;). So as a potential public investor of twitters in the future user-stats would be a key metric to judge Twitter by for its potential upside. If every interaction on Twitter were genuine and from a real person, this represents a total addressable, paying market instead of a market flooded by bots.
My verdict – give him time to assess his approach even in the context of some of the miss-steps we have seen occur in the past week.
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