Elon Musk Puts Twitter Buy on Hold

Spam accounts are the issue.

Photo by Alexander Kelly

Elon Musk just said that he is going to put the buy on hold until he can verify that Twitter has less than five percent spam accounts.

If Twitter has a high percentage of spam or bot accounts, the value of the platform is lessened because it would mean fewer customers from whom to potentially increase the income of the site.

We know that Twitter is crawling with artificial entities that mimic the actions of humans. These tools are used for various purposes, some more nefarious than others.

Fake accounts on Twitter.

If you want to create the illusion of multitudes of people agreeing with a perspective that, in fact, is an outlier or downright unpopular, the solution is to start with a smaller group of people in a room full of computers.

You pay them to impersonate hundreds of individual accounts using the obvious tools and, voila, you have a crowd supporting this political candidate or that unsavory ideology and you can then make moves in the world.

This includes, but is not limited to changing how we think about certain issues.

However, I’m not sure if that is what Musk is talking about when he talks about fake accounts. While the people in the…