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Elon Musk plans a change to Twitter that could make it harder to stop bots

2022-11-17T23:29:17.033Z


Musk said Twitter will stop displaying annotations like "Twitter for iPhone" and "Twitter Web App" at the bottom of tweets.


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(CNN Business) --

Elon Musk has been saying for months that he wants to end spam and fake accounts on Twitter, but a subtle change he's planning for the platform could complicate his goal.


In a tweet this week, Musk said Twitter will stop displaying notations like "Twitter for iPhone" and "Twitter Web App" at the bottom of tweets, which are meant to indicate where users' messages are coming from.

The change may seem small compared to the many other ways the billionaire is changing the company, but it's a move that experts say could make it harder to spot inauthentic activity on the social network.

Musk announced the plan on Monday along with several tweets in which Twitter's new owner apologized for the platform being "super slow in many countries" and explained that he would disable some unnecessary parts of Twitter's architecture.

As part of this, he wrote: "We will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space and computation) below each tweet. Literally no one knows why we did it..." .

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But even if Musk doesn't see the value in it, some academics do.

Online malicious activity and misinformation experts told CNN that knowing how a tweet was posted can serve as one of many signs that there are accounts coordinating posts on the social network, which can be a sign of suspicious activity such as spam or phishing.

Filippo Menczer, a professor at Indiana University and director of the school's Social Media Observatory, explained that while source data can be falsified, it is still one of the measures that can be used to monitor similarities between accounts and detect coordinated behavior.

Menczer said researchers may take this into account along with other factors, such as the specific tweets the accounts post, the time periods in which they are posted and the sources they cite.

"It could constitute a test in combination with something else," he said.

"Or you could look at a very large number of accounts that already look highly suspicious and that field could confirm that they're using some kind of automation."

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The decision to potentially stop displaying feed details is just one of many changes Musk has said he plans to make to the platform, as he makes quick decisions to reduce costs, increase revenue and rethink how one of the best works. the most influential social networks.

In the process, however, Musk has already removed staff and tested changes, including the option to pay for account verification, which some worry could make it harder to fight bots and misinformation.

Musk did not make it clear in his tweet this week when these labels will go away.

It's also unclear whether Twitter will simply stop displaying this information to its users, or if it will also stop providing this data through its application programming interface, or API, which allows third parties to access many types of Twitter data for their users. own applications and research.

Many academic researchers use the Twitter API to study bots and misinformation on the social network.

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Twitter, which recently laid off a significant part of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for clarification or comment.

In addition to helping detect bots, details of a tweet's source can provide a strong indicator of whether an account has been hacked, according to Gianluca Stringhini, an assistant professor at Boston University and co-director of its Security Lab.

For example, in April 2013, shares plummeted after a hacker accessed the Associated Press's main Twitter account and tweeted about a fake attack on the White House.

One thing that stood out, Stringhini said, was that the fake tweet was sent from Twitter's traditional website, which is not what the AP was using to post tweets at the time (it was using third-party software called SocialFlow).

Twitter itself notes the utility of the feature to users in a publicly available guide, which states that these "tweet source tags" not only help users understand how a tweet was posted, but also provide users with users a key context about the publications.

If a tweet is marked as "Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter," for example, it would be clear that the content was posted to both Twitter and the Mastodon social network.

According to the company's "How to Tweet" document, "If you don't recognize the source, you may want to learn more to determine how much you trust the content."

Elon MuskTwitter

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-11-17

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