Tesla Chief Elon Musk, who intends to acquire social media giant Twitter for $44 billion, has put the company in a fix. He just wants the networking firm to come clean by deleting 20% of BOT accounts it owns and uses for marketing practices.
Twitter’s legal team is planning to lock Musk into a legal agreement of $1 billion to pay for breaching the contract. It means in simple words that Musk, who owns Starlink Satellite Internet services, has to pay the said amount if he cannot pay the firm the promised amount or backs out of the transaction for any reason.
Reacting to the breach clause put forward by Twitter, Musk says that his effort to weed out 20% of fake accounts is to keep the internet clean from fake speeches, cyber scams, blasphemy and online activities conducted with malicious intent. He reiterated the fact that the fake accounts generated from bots are being used by some governments, individuals, states, and countries for malevolent purposes. And he wants the company to first take action on removing such accounts and then think of locking him in a merger and acquisition agreement of paying $44 billion as a mandatory acquisition price.
Almost every week, we see some news erupting in the media related to fake bots being used for click campaigns, Ddos attacks, increasing views of content on streaming channels and websites and used for fraudulent cryptocurrency campaigns.
Like in July last year, some cyber crooks took control of a few celebrity accounts of Obama, Satya Nadella and such only to post crypto related cyber scams on their accounts, respectively.
Similarly, hackers are seen hiring accounts owned by marketing firms to get fake click, fake traffic or to show the world how popular their tweets are. And it’s believed almost half of such accounts are owned by bots or virtual machines whose sole purpose is to create traffic in virtual means.
Perhaps, Musk is planning to put an end to all such malpractices and wants 20% of accounts held by bots to be removed from Twitter.
Wonder how Mr. Agarwal and his Twitter board comprising technical and legal experts will react to such demand of Musk?
