Musk hits out at Twitter responses, calls 90% of them bots

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday escalated his war against Twitter, saying 90 per cent of the comments on his tweets are actually bots and shared screenshots of replies by the fake Twitter account of Changpeng Zhao, Founder and CEO of leading crypto exchange Binance.

"And 90 per cent of my comments are bots," he said in a tweet. A follower asked Musk: "Do you think the number of likes you get has a similar proportion of bots vs humans at 90%?"

Earlier this month, Musk went after Parag Agrawal-led platform after a top cybersecurity expert claimed that as high as eight in 10 Twitter accounts are fake.

Dan Woods, Global Head of Intelligence at cybersecurity company F5, told The Australian that more than 80 per cent of Twitter accounts are probably bots -- a massive claim as Twitter says only 5 per cent of its users are bots/spams.

"Sure sounds higher than 5 per cent," tweeted Musk, along with tagging the news article. "On a $/bot basis, this deal is awesome," he added.

Musk has terminated the $44 billion Twitter takeover deal, and the matter is now in a US court, over the presence of bots on the platform, and seeks answers from Agrawal via an open debate.

The Musk-Twitter trial is slated to begin from October 17.

According to Woods, a former CIA and FBI cybersecurity specialist, both Musk and Twitter have underestimated the bot problem on the micro-blogging platform.