Bots have been spreading like diseases on a lot of social media platforms. While there are harmless ones, most are used in more negative matters such as spreading misinformation. X, despite Musk's mission to rid the platform of bots, is still full of them.
No Shortage of Bots on X
An associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, Dr. Timothy Graham has been tracking bot activity regarding the dissemination of false information for years, including the time when Elon Musk purchased Twitter with the promise of eradicating them.
It appears that the company still has a lot of work to do since according to Graham, there are still around 1,305 accounts that are identified as bots. The associate professor along with Ph.D. candidate Kate FitzGerald used a tool called Alexandria Digital for the research.
Around a million tweets were analyzed concerning the first Republican primary debate when former US President Donald Trump was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Due to Musk's new API policies, the researchers had to pay $7,800 to gain access to the posts.
Graham says "It's clear that X is not doing enough to moderate content and has no clear strategy for dealing with political disinformation," as reported by The Guardian. Over 1,200 accounts were spreading disproven claims that Trump won the 2020 election during the interview.
The researchers used an intricate system to identify which accounts were bots and which ones were just hyperpartisan accounts handled by actual people. Posts were analyzed through 11 hashtags and keywords to detect bot activities.
Certain accounts were monitored, especially those that posted the same or similar content and links within five seconds of each other. They also factored in signs like two accounts doing the same mentioned actions five times.
Excessive posting was also one of the signs. For example, an account that goes by "MediaOpinion19" had a daily average number of tweets at 662 times a day or once every two minutes. It retweeted a central account's tweets that were pro-Trump.
Elon Musk's Promise of Removing All Bots
Even before the X owner purchased the social networking site, he already expressed that they would "defeat spam bots or die trying," but so far, the problem remains prevalent. The bots are not only spreading misinformation about politics either.
Bots are also invading direct messages of X users, bombarding them with job offers, chances to trade stocks on WhatsApp, and even requests to converse with attractive women, as reported by Cybernews, all of which prove that the bot problem is anything but handled.
As Graham said, it was a problem in moderation. It has always been an issue with Twitter, and now as X, it continues to be a problem especially since Musk laid off most of the company's staff, including those that are tasked to keep the bots at bay.
Twitter Blue, now called X Blue, was one of the tech billionaire's solutions against bots since it also verifies that the account holder is human. But, not only did it fail to solve anything, the X owner faced backlash for putting the once coveted blue checkmark behind a paywall.
