A newly updated Twitter policy relating to the application programming interface (API) has just been implemented, according to researchers - and the changes will have a profound impact on social media bots, both positive (RSS integration, for example) and negative (political influencer campaigns), respectively.
A tweet from the Twitter development team announced that starting February 9, the API would no longer be accessible for free. It was Elon Musk's personal amendment. Upon hearing some negative publicity, Elon Musk stepped in personally to amend the original terms of service - Twitter is to continue to provide its bots with a light, write-only API that allows them to produce high-quality content for free.
In a computer program, APIs are used to enable different parts of the program to communicate with each other. An API provides an interface for two software programs to interact with one another. This is the same way that your computer provides an interface so that you can easily interact with all of its many complex functions. Enterprises, educational institutions, or bot developers who want to develop applications on Twitter are most likely to need the API for management and analytics.
Whether you choose a limited or subscription model, we are at risk of displacing smaller, less well-funded developers and academics who have utilized free access to develop bots, applications, and research that provide real value for users.
It is also pertinent to note that Twitter has been targeted by malicious bots since the start of time. The use of these social media platforms is on the increase by hackers spreading scams and by evil regimes spreading fake news, and that's without mentioning the smaller-scale factors that affect influencer culture, marketing, and general trolling, which are widespread as well.
What are the pros and cons of using a paid API to solve Twitter's influence campaigns and bot-driven problems? Several experts believe the new move is just a smokescreen to cover up the real problem.
Bad bots on Twitter
According to a report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., in May 2018, social media bots play a significant role in shaping public opinion, particularly at the local level. It was found that Twitter bots had been greatly influenced by the US presidential election and the UK vote on leaving the European Union. This was during the 2016 elections. Based on the data, it appears that the aggressive use of Twitter bots, along with the fragmentation of social media and the influence of sentiment, may all be factors that contributed to the outcome of the votes.
In the UK, the increase in automated pro-leave tweets may have resulted in 1.76 percentage points of the actual pro-leave vote share is explained by the increasing volume of automated tweets. While in the US, 3.23 percentage points of the actual vote could be explained by the influence of bots.
During that election, three states were critical swing states - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan - with a combined number of electoral votes that could have made the difference between victory or defeat - won the election by a mere fraction of a percent.
Often, bots are just helpful tools that can be used by hackers to commit cybercrime at scale without necessarily swaying world history - this can make them a useful tool for committing cybercrime at scale. The use of Twitter bots by cyber criminals has been observed in the distribution of spam and malicious links on Twitter. This is as well as the amplifying of their content and profiles on the site.
David Maynor, director of the Cybrary Threat Intelligence Team and chief technology officer for Dark Reading, explains in an interview that bots are an incredibly huge problem for the Internet. Some random objects taunt people so much that victims would spend hours or days trying to prove that they were wrong. That would be the real world. Bots also give Astroturf efforts a veneer of legitimacy, they do not deserve.
Astroturfing is a type of marketing strategy designed to create an impression that a product or service has been chosen by the general public in a way that appears to be an independent assessment without actually being so (hiding sponsorship information, for instance, or presenting "reviews" as objective third-party assessments).
Are Twitter's motives hidden?
According to some people, Twitter's real motive behind placing its API behind a paywall has nothing to do with security, and instead, it could be something else entirely. The question is then, would a basic subscription plan be strong enough to guard against a cybercrime group, or indeed a lone scammer, who might be targeting your account? One of the most active operators of social media influence campaigns in the world is certainly not the Russian government.
There are many mobile app security platforms and cloud-based solutions that can be used to eliminate bot traffic from mobile apps easily, and Elon Musk is well aware of these technologies. Ted Miracco, CEO at Approov, says: Bot traffic could be largely eliminated overnight if the proper technologies are implemented.
Several methods and tools exist to help social media sites (and site owners and administrators of all types of websites) snuff out botnets, and they can be used by all our social media users. It is imperative to keep in mind that bots tend to respond predictably. They, for example, post regularly and only in certain ways. There are specialized tools that can help you identify entire networks of bots. By identifying just a few suspect accounts, these tools can help reveal what are a few suspect accounts.
There is a theory that naming and shaming may well be critically significant in diagnosing malicious automated tweets along with detecting malicious automated tweets: This might not be popular, but it is the only way to stop bots and information operations. People and organizations must be tied to real-life accounts and organizations.
In this regard, Livnek adds, Whilst this raises concerns about privacy and misuse of data, remember that these platforms are already mining all of the available data on the platforms to increase user engagement. Tying accounts to real-world identities wouldn't affect the platforms' data harvesting, but would instead enable them to stamp out bots and [astroturfing].
It seems a bit extreme to remove free API access before we have exhausted all feasible security measures that might have been available to us.
As Miracco argues, the reason for this is an open secret in Silicon Valley - it is basically the elephant in the room. According to Miracco, social media companies are increasingly liking their bots in terms of generating revenue for them.
Twitter makes money by selling advertisements and this is the basis of its business model. As a result, bots are viewed by advertisers as users, i.e. they generate revenue in the same way as users do.
There is more money to be made when there are more bots.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk threatened to pull out of his plan to buy Twitter in January, reportedly as a result of the revelation that a large portion of Twitter's alleged users is actually bots or other automated programming. As he transitioned from being an interested party to becoming the outright owner of the company, his mood may have changed. The Miracco Group's CEO predicts that "revealing the problem now will result in a precipitous fall in traffic, so revenue must be discovered along the way to maintain the company's relevance along the path to reduced traffic, which was the motivation behind the API paywall.
His explanation is straightforward: the paywall is ostensibly used to stop bots, but the truth is that it is being used to drive revenue.
There has just been the implementation of a paywall. Whether it will be able to solve Twitter's bot problem by itself or if it will only be a matter of Musk's pockets being lined, only time will tell.
Despite a request from reporters for comment, Twitter did not respond immediately to the query.
