Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 585 posts

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#201

Post by jacquesm »

theptip wrote: post #145
bostonsre wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk didn't do (and subsequently waived) due diligence. Wasn't him collecting all of this MAU stuff to analyze it part of the due diligence needed in order to close the deal?

No. He signed the merger agreement without doing DD into mDAU, and didn’t write any contingencies around mDAU onto the contract. You do your diligence BEFORE signing the merger agreement.

Exactly. This whole thing smacks of regret on an impulse buy. And as Musk should well know: regret is no cause for contract annulment. Twitter is going to be his Waterloo if he can't follow through on the deal, they're going to force him to perform which means he may have to sell a whole bunch more stock to people who know he has to buy. That isn't going to help at all.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#202

Post by dragontamer »

Banana699 wrote: post #199
jjeaff wrote: post #105

Imagine this whole ordeal playing out on a house that was not listed for sale. The buyer starts harassing the homeowner to sell to them, they say no, so he buys up the mortgage lender and tries to force a sale. His antics are hurting the home's value so you relent to selling and give him an as-is sale contract, which he signs and gives you 24 hrs to respond or he will try to force a sale. All the while, this is of co…

Quoted post unavailable.

> Legally ? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and law can frequently have surprising implications in the twists and turns of the its logical structure, which - as a bonus - differ by time and exact place.

The contract states the place of the law. Specifically: in the Delaware Chancery Court. The contract also states the time and conditions of the contract.

Have you read the contract? Its public. Furthermore, the date of the court case has been set for October. It seems unlikely that Delaware law is going to change dramatically between then and now.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#203

Post by jacquesm »

bostonsre wrote: post #138
phailhaus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane because Twitter has been very careful to explain that the 5% number is not some sort of "promise". > Additionally, our calculation of mDAU is not based on any standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies. Similarly, our measures of mDAU growth and engagement may differ from estimates published…

Twitter added a loop hole saying that their data might be incorrect. It seems disingenuous to absolve them of all sins if their data is hugely incorrect to the point where it's fraudulent just because they added that loop hole.

Maybe, but that's just not how it normally works and Musks reality distortion field does probably not include the courts. You sign a terms sheet conditional on DD and only afterwards do you move to put in a binding offer. Doing it in a different order is a waste of effort, after all, what's the point of doing DD after you've already made a binding offer? You can't use it to change the deal parameters and you can't use it to break it up.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#204

Post by pavon »

nonethewiser wrote: post #104
phailhaus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane because Twitter has been very careful to explain that the 5% number is not some sort of "promise". > Additionally, our calculation of mDAU is not based on any standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies. Similarly, our measures of mDAU growth and engagement may differ from estimates published…

That's not what the original poster implied. He implied it's crazy because of the duration and specific purpose of the supposed lie.

Doesn't seem strange to me. If I am suing a company for false advertising I'll claim that their behavior was aimed at inducing me to purchase the product at an inflated price. Not because I think they were specifically conspiring to target those lies directly at me personally, but because I am the one that is a party to the lawsuit. If Twitter was lying to inflate the stock price in general, then they were inducing everyone to buy at an inflated price and Musk is one of those people.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#205

Post by dahdum »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #122
benj111 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reach the opposite conclusion. He offers to buy twitter on a whim, then changes his mind after signing a contract. That doesn't really seem like a good way of getting to the top.

People are missing the obvious story. He locked himself into a price, then the price of things crashed. It has crashed so much that he's honestly better off just walking away and losing the billion dollars... but he doesn't want to lose a billion dollars so he's gonna do whatever he can do to get out of it.

Oh it's definitely not about a billion dollars. He'd pay that out in an instant if he could. The contract he signed and the law itself is not on his side, he may yet slither out of his commitments, but Twitter would never settle for a mere $1B when they've lost so much more in value due to him.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#206

Post by jacquesm »

pauldenton wrote: post #27
jjeaff wrote: post #16

I find it rather ridiculous and in bad faith that Musk is harping on the bot issue for 2 reasons. First, it wouldn't matter anyway. He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement. And secondly, it's completely impossible for any outside analysis to determine the number of active users on Twitter because most active Twitter users don't tweet or interact in anyway. They just read tweets and those u…

"He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement." Why do more fraudsters not use contracts If people can sign away due diligence, sign up for a Diamond, get a Lemon, and have no recourse, surely scammers would be doing this instead of structuring their scam in a way that has the potential of sending them to jail

The default is that you have the right to perform due diligence prior to making a binding offer. If you make a binding offer and waive the right to due diligence doing it later and using whatever you find to back out of the deal or change the price likely will not work. Musk can't claim he's a business newbie and besides that was spelled out black-on-white.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#207

Post by Ferret7446 »

daed wrote: post #120
nomel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's banana-pants insane about a company inflating their hard-to-discover numbers, for profit? I thought that was, unfortunately, banana-pants standard? For example, the fiction that is Twitter or Reddit's user count.

One point not mentioned (and I’m just paraphrasing Levine from Money Stuff here): It’s crazy because it would probably be BETTER if you had more bots. Then you could say that your revenue per user was higher and you could argue that you had more room for growth. So, if anything, lying and OVERestimating the bot count would help your valuation more.

Not really, because the revenue comes from ads not users. Twitter makes profit from ad buyers thinking they are reaching many users. The "revenue per user was higher" you mention is actually "cost per ad impression" and ad buyers want that to be low.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#208

Post by dragontamer »

iasay wrote: post #123
dragontamer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer? Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge masses of people on Twitter. The house in question. Its so ridiculous. Musk's popularity is largely *BECAUSE* of his Twitter antics. So this "buyer" is basically someone who has come to house-parties / benefited from the house in question for the last decade. And the people arguing against the (current owners)…

If his popularity is due to what he posts on twitter it would appear that a large proportion of the human race are deranged morons.

A hundred years ago, you just traveled from city-to-city with your posse of 20-guys. Those 20 guys would pretend to be an interested crowd (which draws in / astroturfs fake interest) Real people then start to join the crowd. You then show off your snake oil product working ("guest#1 from the crowd", who is of course your buddy), and then the real people will get excited, and buy your snake oil.

Today, you just buy a bunch of likes / retweets to perform the same astroturfing on a larger scale. Bonus points if you "meme" it and "go viral". You want all those people out there to be spreading your message at no cost to you.

A little bit of astroturfing goes a long way. People want to feel as part of a community. So a bit of fake-generated content and fake-interest helps at seeding the crowd and popularity.

---------

Stage magicians still do this today for entertainment purposes, rather than illegitimately hawking fake snake oil. Its a very good bit of entertainment. It does take some practice but once you get the technique, its quite repeatable.

Turns out that human psychology / group dynamics are in fact, predictable and consistent.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#209

Post by evan_ »

logicalmonster wrote: post #56

Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably not a great one for this type of analysis. 1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or forgetting about the account after a short time after de…

The people who sign up for Twitter, dork around for a little while, and then leave and never return are not counted among the monetizable daily active users.

Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

#210

Post by logicalmonster »

simiones wrote: post #168
logicalmonster wrote: post #56

Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably not a great one for this type of analysis. 1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or forgetting about the account after a short time after de…

All good points, and all proving that the methods used by Musk are unreliable for saying who is or isn't a bot - thus proving Twitter's point.

If I brought up good points, you should note that they apply more heavily to Musk than most other humans, which means that Twitter's response doesn't necessarily prove anything.

It's not the testing tool that's necessarily bad. Botometer claims to look at over 1,000 features, which is pretty impressive. The problem might be applying that tool on Musk's profile for the specific reasons that I brought up. Musk is an outlier in many ways and isn't necessarily a good sample for an individual test as he'd tend to draw more bots than an average users' profile.

Post reply on HN