When Elon Musk acquired X (formerly Twitter), he pledged to rid it of bots, or fake accounts that tend to serve as trolls and conduits for misinformation. “We will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” Musk tweeted in 2022, a few months before he officially bought the social media platform.
But a new analysis by Cyabra, in partnership with GZERO, found that roughly 20% of the accounts interacting with election-related tweets from Musk were, in fact, bots.
Cyabra analyzed five notable Musk posts that pertained to issues like the endorsement and competence of the two presidential candidates, concerns over free speech under a potential Harris administration, and immigration policies. It found that “bot-driven accounts dominated much of the conversation, with their sentiment and content suggesting an agenda to influence public perception and even hinting at potential coordinated activity among bot communities.”
These inauthentic accounts “were responsible for driving a disproportionately large share of the engagement and traffic.”
In two additional posts analyzed, ones in which Musk firmly positioned himself against the Harris-Walz ticket, 40% of the activity was driven by inauthentic accounts. “A closer examination of the engagement revealed coordinated activity between these inauthentic accounts, with two distinct bot clusters working in tandem to amplify traffic and drive engagement,” Cyabra’s report said.
While Musk often laments the spread of disinformation in the digital era in which we live, he frequently spreads it himself to hundreds of millions of followers — and the site he owns continues to be at the heart of the problem.