A lot has happened since Elon Musk announced that he was willing to pay $44 billion to own Twitter. While he walks around the company's facilities sharing his vision for the future of the platform, Twitter shareholders have launched a lawsuit against the businessman, alleging that he is damaging the value of the company in order to renegotiate the price of his purchase.
Adding to that are fears that the deal simply won't happen, as Elon argues that the platform has too many users who aren't real. According to a tweet from Musk last month, the eccentric billionaire claimed that 20 percent of accounts on the platform are fake or spam, far above the 5 percent that Twitter reports internally.
From tweet to politics
In Latin America, political parties and candidates have well understood the importance of social networks in electoral processes.
During the recent presidential election in Colombia in which Gustavo Petro was elected president, according to data from Meta, the left-wing candidate spent 2.23 billion Colombian pesos in the last ninety days, equivalent to just over 538 thousand dollars on his platforms from March 27 to June 24.
Meanwhile, Federico "Fico" Gutierrez, another of the candidates for the presidency in the Colombian presidential race this 2022, spent 1.78 billion Colombian pesos, which means just over 428 thousand dollars, in the same period.
It should be noted that these figures do not include other social networks, time on radio, television, or inserts in national circulation newspapers, among others.
While researchers warn that there is no causal relationship between fake news and bot activity on social media and actual votes in elections, it is undeniable that the political propaganda landscape has been profoundly disrupted by technology and social media. Otherwise, we would not see these million-dollar expenditures in electoral contests.
Another example is the 2016 elections, where. a Princeton University research determined that despite fake news and suspicious accounts that sought to position then-candidate Donald Trump, Twitter acted against the former president because the platform was used to criticize him during his candidacy and presidency.
In general, the researchers say, social media users tend to be young people from urban areas, who tend to have a preference for the Democratic Party. However, they warn that this research does not include Facebook or other social media, where the picture can be very different.
It is this difference between users who support Democratic candidates that is at the root of Musk's interest, as he has openly declared himself against left-wing politicians and Democrats in general.
The reason for buying the social network, according to Musk, is that "it is very important that it be an exclusive arena for freedom of expression." An action clearly driven by policies to combat the false information and hate speech that the platform and user migration after Donald Trump's account was suspended.
The truth is that the American Far Right's speeches openly and frankly approach hate speech that clearly violates Twitter's community rules. From rejection and aggression against the LGBTIQ+ community to calls for attacks motivated by religious extremists.
The problem of bots
For current executives of the blue bird social network, bots and fake accounts help inflate the number of active users to investors, while generating interaction on the platform.
Musk's intentions, on the other hand, are contradictory. He is preparing to reduce the presence of fake accounts while announcing a position of disdain for active moderation and restriction of scandalous posts.
Behind the tycoon's speech about freedom of expression lies a purely political motivation: he doesn't like the composition of the population of his favourite social network and has enough money to change it. Bots and other questions about the ethics and importance of the platform in our daily lives, unfortunately, are secondary.
The problem of statistics lies in the methodology, in other words, in how the parameters are constructed to measure the object of study of interest.
Twitter notes that its 5 percent calculation is based only on monetizable users, so the figure applies only to that population. In contrast, SparkToro conducted an investigation in which they conclude that 19.42 percent of a sample of 44,058 randomly selected public Twitter accounts are fake or spam.
We can get close to a definitive figure, but the answer is as elusive as the definition of fake users itself. They are not just “bots” – programs and code designed to write tweets automatically and mechanically – there are also people paid for specific purposes.
SparkToro’s methodology, for example, makes a distinction between the two and explains the differences between an “organic” and a “designed” account. Of course, these “designed” accounts, which are often called “trolls” or “spam,” can interact with other users when they are accused of being “bots,” making it harder to recognize them.
The job of these accounts is to spread disinformation and attack people and figures like in the case of the Mexican State News Agency, Notimex, in Mexico. They are also used for marketing and to promote products, but without a doubt the most common use of fake accounts is in politics, from buying interactions to position a character in the public scene to dirty war campaigns.
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