Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots (original) (raw)
from the but-of-course dept
Rolling Stone has a fun article quoting multiple former Twitter employees highlighting that polls are the least secure tool on the platform, and are regularly open to manipulation by bots:
“Polls are more prone to manipulation than almost anything else [on Twitter]. It’s interesting, given his [Elon’s] use of polls,” he added. Several other ex-Twitter employees gave similar assessments.
This seems particularly notable for two reasons: (1) Musk’s sudden reliance on polls for making big content moderation decisions, and (2) his formerly professed (though of questionable seriousness) claims about concerns regarding bots on the platform.
On point one, we already discussed the ridiculousness, and lack of seriousness, in using easily gamed polls as a tool for content moderation. While supporters like to argue it’s “democratic,” it has none of the actual hallmarks of integrity around the “voting.” And this report regarding the manipulation just makes that even clearer:
“When someone says. ‘Oh we must be protecting polls, right?’ No, we’re not,” the former Twitter employee told Rolling Stone.
In the years since the feature debuted, a small industry of spammers has cropped up to offer services manipulating the results of a Twitter poll with inauthentic accounts. The spammers allow users to buy votes in chunks, some offering 15,000 votes on a given poll for a little over $130 or smaller responses for just 19 cents a vote with “guaranteed fast delivery” that’s “100% Confidential.”
For what it’s worth, the Rolling Stone article perhaps gives a little too much credence to the idea that Musk ever seriously considered “bots” a problem on Twitter. It was always clear that it was a pretense to try to get out of the deal. So the fact that he pretended to care about bots on the platform for a few months shouldn’t be taken to mean he really believes it’s a problem. Especially right now when he desperately wants to show growth to woo back advertisers who have abandoned ship.
The Rolling Stone piece does a nice job also highlighting how Musk’s recent claims of big increases in the mDAU may also be facing the same issue as the polls: a lack of staff manually removing spammers:
But it’s not clear how much of that claimed growth is authentic. Asked whether those numbers could be inflated by spam accounts, the former Twitter staffer told Rolling Stone: “No fucking doubt.”
“Think about it: On any given week, [the security] team removed millions of accounts manually,” the source said.
Of course, on Wednesday, Musk publicly claimed that the site was removing a bunch of spammers:
Of course, somewhat hilariously, the purge ended up killing a bunch of high profile legitimate accounts. Early on, there were reports of some high profile “left leaning” critics of Musk who were removed leading to claims that the Muskian Twitter was dealing in “anti-left bias,” but as with the years of false claims under the old regime of “anti-conservative bias” the reality appeared to be much more mundane: the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. Indeed, some of the other accounts that were suspended included Elon Musk’s most vociferous number one fan.
Turns out content moderation, including dealing with spam and bots, is, you know, not easy.