Not All Bots Are Bad, and Twitter Knows It
They’ve been alleged to have helped shift the course of the 2016 presidential election, and are a key component of Elon Musk’s ongoing attempts to wriggle out of his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. They’re lambasted as the single thing ruining social media, and lauded as a key weapon in state-sponsored cyberwarfare.
Bots have become public enemy number one in recent years, and remain in the spotlight thanks to Twitter’s former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zadko’s claims that the company’s “senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts.” Twitter’s apparent inaction in tackling bots—and its supposed underestimation of the proportion of users that are bots—is one of Musk’s main arguments for attempting to sidestep his deal to buy the social media platform.
But are bots all that bad?
