A review of recent traffic during the Super Bowl led a cybersecurity company to conclude that Elon Musk’s X/Twitter is infested with bots and phony accounts. Research shows that during the big game, up to 76% of traffic to X/Twitter ads was generated by bots rather than actual users.
According to Mashable, Super Bowl LVIII broke all previous viewing records and became the most-viewed U.S. broadcast in CBS history. X recorded one billion video views and ten billion impressions during the significant game. While X provided 76% of the traffic to marketers’ websites that weekend, cybersecurity company CHEQ asserts that roughly 76% was bogus.
The results are from examining fourteen thousand visitors to X/Twitter advertisements throughout Super Bowl weekend. He said that X/Twitter had never seen anything like the massive bot activity during the Super Bowl.
On the other hand, that same weekend, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very low percentages of fraudulent traffic coming to their advertisers. Of more than 40 million, TikTok had the lowest rate of bot visitors at 2.56%.
Even after the Super Bowl, X/Twitter’s fictitious traffic jam persists. Nearly 32% of the 759,000 ad hits made by Musk’s platform in January were bots, according to CHEQ. The percentages for other sites were much lower; for example, TikTok was 2.8%, Facebook was 2%, and Instagram was less than 1%.
Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter, had previously met with Tytunovich, who urged him to fix the bot problem on the network. He emphasizes that CHEQ can identify phony users accessing customers’ websites but can’t tell you how many bogus accounts are on the platform. But CHEQ’s customer base regularly sees fake stuff.
The bot issue has only worsened since Musk bought X/Twitter in October 2022.
Professionals blame the introduction of X Premium and other paid membership services run by Musk and creator monetization options that use advertisements to spread bots. By publishing content liked and shared by humans and other bots, bots may earn money on the network. You can see this phenomenon in action if you look at the responses to a popular post, which are often a mishmash of other viral material meant to entice participation.
