(More often, an app will report monthly active users, people who log on at least once in the last 30 days.) So it’s uncertain whether even a well-intentioned Musk could use the firehose API to calculate the same number of monetizable daily active users. To be precise, Twitter has said bots account for less than 5% of its “monetizable daily active users,” a figure of Twitter’s own creation. With so much wiggle room, Musk can probably use the firehose API to assemble whatever conclusions best fit his goal, which, again, seems like it is to find some reason to force Twitter to accept a reduced price.įurther, it’s unclear whether even a good-faith effort on Musk’s part could fully replicate Twitter’s process, matching its internal estimate. “So maybe if somebody tweets more than 1,000 tweets in a day, he's a bot right? But maybe somebody else will say, It should be if they tweet more than 50 times.” The best tool for identifying bots, Botometer, which comes from an Indiana University team, offers only a rough gauge of bot activity, giving a probability score for whether an account is a bot, never a certainty. “If you put two people in the room and ask about the definition of anything, they would have a different opinion-and especially about the definition of what is a bot on Twitter,” says Muric. There’s no universally accepted definition, even among the field’s top researchers. To start, his definition of what constitutes a bot account could quite easily differ from Twitter’s. Most to the point, while Musk can use his access to the firehose API to come up with an estimate of bot activity on Twitter, it seems almost inevitable that his figure won’t match Twitter’s. And not just because it will take Musk considerable time to do an analysis of bots on Twitter, a task requiring a team of researchers who will need to laboriously construct software to review the tweets. But the decision is unlikely to provide a meaningful end to the dispute between the billionaire and the company he may possibly buy. Sure, it’s amusing to see Twitter pull a Musk on Musk-to try, ostensibly, to call his bluff. “And you can have multiple polls all the time and pretty much accurate results” dovetailing with what a more expansive census would produce, Muric says. Polls work with smaller, easier-to-use sample sizes. The difference between the results gleaned from the decahose and the firehose equates to the difference between “a poll and a census,” says Muric. In truth, Musk probably only needs the “decahose” API Twitter makes available to some researchers, which is 10% of all tweets. You don’t want access to everything,” says Goran Muric, a computer scientist at USC’s Institute for Information Sciences who has worked with similar Twitter APIs. Enjoy! “He doesn’t need access to everything. To be clear, it is entirely overkill for Twitter to provide Musk with such broad access, a move meant to say to him, You want data? Here’s all the data we got! We’re not hiding a thing.
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