[deminature]

They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially.

Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.

[inetknght]

> but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations.

If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.

[deminature]

There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument.

Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

[pax]

it might be awesome, if the signature is somewhat obvious, to have an independent entity flagging / creating a suspected bots database?

_maybe_ that would put some pressure on Twitter?

    https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer
    https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf 
    https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscore