Bots and fake news are devouring X

X, the former Twitter, is inundated with bots.A problem for the company, its advertisers but also the state of information on the platform.

“If our bid is successful, we will defeat the bots or die trying.”In April 2022 Elon Musk he had clear ideas:would have bought Twitter for $44 billion, despite trying to back out of its own binding offer, and would have solved its main problems.Among these, that of freedom of expression, in his opinion threatened by the then management of the social network, and that of the bots. Every social platform has bots and fake accounts:they are a physiological and inevitable presence, below certain percentages.

And that's exactly the problem:second an analysis of Cheq, which deals with cybersecurity and bot monitoring, Twitter's situation would have worsened since then.The social network, which is now called X, has a big spam problem and fake accounts, but during Super bowl weekend he would have crossed the line.In recent weeks, X has celebrated the excellent results of those days, declaring ten billion "impressions" for American football-themed content and one billion video views.The problem is, Cheq calculated, “75.8 percent of the traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the Super Bowl” was generated by bots. A “shocking” percentage according to the agency's founder Guy Tytunovich, who told the site Mashable that I've never seen it anywhere near fifty percent,  let alone 76 percent.

Those who frequent X won't be that surprised by this data.In viral posts on the platform It is now common to find answers posted by obvious programmed bots to reply to successful tweets, with the hope of gaining views or spamming products related to cryptocurrencies.The British Guardian newspaper has told of a small business owner who spent fifty dollars on advertising onNot bad for that amount spent.“Despite this, according to Google Analytics, X was not among the sources of real traffic received by the site in that period.” Click ghosts, In short:bot.

The problem does not only concern advertisers, who have abandoned or reduced their presence on the platform for months.According to the Washington Post the increase of bots onthe social network would be part of one political disinformation campaign conducted by Chinese profiles posing as US citizens with the aim of exacerbating divisions in the country.The goal is the US elections next November.The method, the same one already seen in 2016 and 2020, is made of confusion and extremization of the electorate, which is bombarded with fake news and tweets designed to unleash the anger and obsessions of certain political parties.

Also for this reason, for some time, the main companies in the social sector have met every two weeks to discuss the status of their services and exchange useful information for defeat any operations foreign similar to this one.In recent months, Meta and Google's attention in this regard has waned, to be honest, but X seems to have forgotten about the phenomenon and "for months now" he hasn't shown up at these meetings.“They have disappeared,” a representative of these meetings told the Washington Post, as the elections get ever closer and the platform is in the grip of a not-so-silent majority of bots.