The Tricky Business of Elon Musk Getting Twitter Fire-Hose Access

The social media platform seems to have acquiesced to Musk's request to gain access to a "fire hose" of internal data held by the company.

For weeks, Musk has been asking for data that would allow him to test if a lot of the platform's users are fake bot accounts, something that would cheapen the price he'd be willing to pay for the company. Musk wants the company to prove that bot accounts make up less than 5 percent of the users.

According to The Washington Post, in order to allow Musk to look for inauthentic behavior, the company is willing to give him access to every single day's worth of posts. The data is referred to as the fire hose. WIRED wanted to know if the Post report was confirmed or denied. The suitor's lawyers sent a letter to the company saying it was "actively resisting and obstructing" Musk's information rights and threatening to withdraw from the deal.

The reported shift to grant Musk access to the data is significant, and it raises two important questions: One, will Musk get what he wants from the data he's been given, and the other, will he be able to use it? What does gaining access mean for daily users?

The move is being called a bluff by Professor Bruns. He says that by giving him access to the fire hose, they can say to him, "prove your claims about the abundance of bots, then." Bruns thinks that it would be difficult for Musk to track down the bots. It isn't likely to be the right way to answer the question for someone with the necessary skills. It is not clear if access to the fire hose of 500 million tweets a day will help Musk answer the question of the proportion of users who are bots. Leerssen is a researcher in information law at the University of Amsterdam. The data isn't the data you need to figure out who is a bot or not

The subject of figuring out what makes a bot a bot has been debated for a long time in the field of academia, one that experts have devoted much of their working lives to. People tend to underestimate how easy it is to detect bots. The fire hose isn't going to enable you to do that unless you combine it with other research methods I don't think that's something that Musk will have time for The man who could answer the question about how that data would help Musk didn't reply to the email.