In April, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter after weeks of speculation, rumors, and something of a financial chess match with Twitter's board of directors.
The $44 billion deal was both jeered and cheered, but Musk did vow to defeat the spam bots of Twitter. Bots are automated accounts that post information with no direct human involvement.
There are many legitimate uses for bots because they can post information quickly. There are also many nefarious uses.
Twitter, one of smallest social media sites with just 340 million users, is said to be the town square for the famous and influential. But it's also central casting for spam bots, which post the majority of tweeted links to popular Websites — up to 66 percent, according to Pew Research. Sports sites can be made up of over 76 percent of bot posts.
Some bots are meant to be funny or just annoying. One bot patrols tweets to find instances of "Beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice" and then responds with the voice of the lead character of the film by the same name.
But other bots have been accused of spreading disinformation. The Russians have been accused of using social bots to try to destabilize the West.
Political types routinely accuse their opponents of using bots to spread their points of view. Pew Research found that political bots were used roughly equally by both liberals and conservatives, each side accounting for about 41 to 44 percent of link sharing.
If he were to win against spam bots, Musk would have a big task. There are about 350,000 tweets per minute, 500 million tweets per day and about 200 billion tweets per year, according to dsayce.com.
