In October, Twitter and Elon Musk will go to court over the recent dispute about the takeover bid.
The issue has dominated headlines and many who are commenting on the issue are focusing on the craziness of the matter and there’s no shortage of criticism against Elon Musk. What seems to be missing is the focus on what Musk has raised about Twitter's users.
He has claimed that some of the users are not authentic and they are bots. Some claim that this is just a way for Musk to find a way out of this deal.
Whether this is true or not, Musk has raised an issue that requires serious consideration. The greater issue that needs attention is the true nature of users within Twitter and other platforms.
This is important, not just for Musk but for the advertising industry, businesses that use the internet to advertise and other economic players.
The issue should not just be about Twitter. There’s a need to reflect deeper about the dependency on Google to measure online activity.
A former VP of Engineering at Google, Vivek Raghunathan, has recently indicated that “Google controls nearly all of the world’s access to information on the internet. Their monopoly in search means for billions of people, their gateway to knowledge, to products, and their exploration of the web is in the hands of one company”.
At the same time, there’s a reliance on Google to tell us about the performance of online activity which influences online revenues for many companies in the digital space.
Who checks the accuracy and authenticity of what Google is telling companies about online activity? Is it acceptable that Google can also tweak and change the measuring stick with which we measure online activity?
Another entity that many rely upon in the digital economy is Facebook.
This Meta-owned company has too much influence over how the internet economy makes money online. From time-to-time Facebook makes changes that impacts on economic revenue of those who use their tools.
All the players play a dominant role in the market, hence the reliance on their services. Most of them they’ve built the digital roads that they end up monitoring and share data on their activity.
There’s little room for competition. In terms of search Vivek Raghunathan and Asim Shankar, who is also former Google engineer and now founder of an alternative search engine, have argued that “one of the biggest obstacles to competing in search is a lack of crawl neutrality.
The only way to build an independent search engine and the chance to fairly compete against Big Tech is to first efficiently and effectively crawl the internet.
However, the web is a hostile environment for upstart search engine crawlers, with most websites only allowing Google’s crawler and discriminating against other search engine crawlers”.
This is one of the reasons why everyone is just reliant on single and few entities.
Musk has poked a hole in the bubble that many tech companies would like to keep intact.
The question he has asked of Twitter about user numbers should be asked of Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and many others that make money based on the number of users.
As long as these companies are dominant in their industries it will be difficult to know with certainty the true nature of online data about users.
Is it not time that independent audit organisations are created to establish the true nature of user data online. Beyond bots, there are users with multiple accounts or even inactive.
How can the user data be measured in such a way that it can be trusted?
The questions asked by Musk will probably make it difficult for some to trust the internet economy.
Of course, there are ways to take care of imperfections in data and address the margin of error. The challenge, however, is that no one knows the extent to which big tech companies manage the accuracy of data since there’s no one else to check on them.
In South Africa, there’s a famous story of a social platform that miscalculated its numbers and realised this late. That social platform is no longer today as investors realised that they were fooled.
The positive aspect about Twitter and Musk going to court is that we may get a chance to look into the user data.
We can only hope that the US Justice System has skilled people and tools to study the data.
Twitter and Musk trial should inspire the establishment of a global independent monitor of the internet to provide accurate data about users of online platforms.
* Wesley Diphoko is the Editor-in-Chief of FastCompany (SA) magazine. He hosts weekly TwitterSpaces on technology and innovation, you can follow him on Twitter via: @WesleyDiphoko
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or Independent Media.
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