Musk said he would follow the will of the people if he decided to leave the company. The results of such surveys can be easily manipulated by computers.
According to the nonprofit digital rights group Accountable Tech, a person can buy tens of thousands of votes for a poll using bot-for-hire services. Musk uses the tool to chart the future of one of the most influential social media companies.
In the months leading up to the acquisition, Musk claimed that there was a problem with the user numbers on the platform and that the problem has been solved. Overall user numbers have gone up under his leadership, according to him.
There isn't any evidence that the number of bots has gone down. Nicole Gill, co-founder and executive director of Accountable Tech said, "Bots are flourishing under Musk, it's now easier than ever to use them to manipulate polls on social media."
Polls can be used to help make a decision. When it comes to key business decisions, such as whether or not a CEO should lead a company, the decision is usually made by the boards and stockholders.
A request for comment was not responded to by the social networking site.
Despite protestations from critics that the polls were easily gamed and unrepresentative of the user base, Musk has continued to use polls to create brand new social media policy on the fly. There is not much evidence that the platform has solved the problem. According to a report from Platformer, Musk blocked traffic from around 30 mobile carriers around the world in order to cut off access to hundreds of thousands of accounts in the Asia-Pacific region. The block on the carriers has been reversed.
The night of December 18th, Musk ran his most popular poll yet, asking users if he should step down as the company's CEO. Musk replied to users on the platform that he didn't agree with the result of the poll.
He was less confident in the integrity of the user base after his fans suggested that the votes could have been manipulated. That change will be made by the social networking site.
Two former members of the Trust and Safety team said that the company lacks proper safeguards to identify and eradicate inauthentic behavior. According to one of the people familiar with the tools, it is possible to detect fake engagement on the site by using technical signals.
The people said that since the ability to vote on a poll ends after a certain period of time, there isn't any way to reverse manipulated votes.
In December, Accountable Tech set up a dummy account called "VoxPopuliVoxBot" and ran a series of polls to analyze the scale of manipulation that was possible on the social networking site. The research found that up to 26,261 votes could be cast by bots for a mere $57, with the votes being delivered within a day. The experiment was conducted using for-hire manipulation services from Russia, India and Turkey.
On December 16th, the dummy account asked if polls on the social networking site could be trusted. The researchers tried to determine if fake votes could be bought at scale, targeting half a million to a million votes set to be delivered in 24 hours, but the manipulation services didn't have that capacity. If the for-hire manipulation services were to increase their bandwidth, it would cost between $2,500 and $6,000 to throw a popular poll.
The researchers followed their dummy account and bought fake comments. A person with knowledge of the technology explained that the inflated follower count was evidence of automated controls against bots. There were other safeguards in place on the system. If a user checked the service's quality filter, fake followers bought through for-hire manipulated systems could only be seen.
Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, said in a recent interview that one of the big discussions was around the tradeoffs between integrity and privacy. It was on the side of privacy that we landed. Polls are more likely to be manipulated than almost anything else on social media.
In order to test whether manipulated votes worked on a live poll, in December the Accountable Tech researchers bought votes on a poll being conducted by the white nationalist far-right media personality Tim Gionet, who runs an account called "Bakedalaska" on the social networking site.
Gionet asked his audience if he should use a racist slur on the social networking site. In order to prove that the manipulation was doable, Accountable Tech bought 2,000 votes on both the 'yes' and 'no' options. The poll closed after the votes on both options were counted.
After 52 percent of the votes were counted, the people had spoken. He said that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Musk has expanded his use of polls to1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 He asked if congress should approve the spending bill. He shared the result with senators.
He said the public had spoken.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
