Is Elon Musk right about Twitter spam bots? Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon has answers
Reliable Sources
CNN
3.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kathleen Carley, a computer scientist and specialist in dynamic network analysis, defines spam bots, fake accounts, and other maladies of social networking. She discusses Elon Musk's recent questions about bots on Twitter and says the attention may be beneficial. She also says that "focusing on the number of bots is perhaps not a good thing to focus on, because more important than the numbers is how active are they and what are they active about."
To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The great Twitter drama of 2022 is revolving around spandots. |
| 0:07.0 | That's the stated reason for Elon Musk to delay his takeover of Twitter. |
| 0:13.0 | So, is Musk right to be concerned? |
| 0:17.0 | What are spandots anyway? |
| 0:19.0 | And what is Twitter doing about them? |
| 0:22.0 | Those are just a few of the questions for this week's reliable sources podcast. |
| 0:26.0 | So, let's cue the music. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Brian Stelter and this weekly podcast is our chance to go more in depth, |
| 0:35.0 | talking with media leaders and newsmakers about how the media world works. |
| 0:41.0 | Every day there are new headlines about Musk and his plan to take over Twitter. |
| 0:47.0 | A plan that he now says is on hold due to the proliferation of spam bots on the platform. |
| 0:54.0 | This is something Musk knew about when he entered into the deal, so it's confusing he's bringing it up now. |
| 1:00.0 | But it raises a lot of questions about what spam bots actually are and what if anything could be done about them. |
| 1:07.0 | I wanted to know more about this, so I started googling, researching, reading, and one name kept coming up over and over again. |
| 1:15.0 | Kathleen Carly is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in dynamic network analysis. |
| 1:23.0 | What is that? Well, she's here to tell us now. |
| 1:27.0 | Professor, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. |
| 1:30.0 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:32.0 | I think we're going to have to start at the most basic level. |
| 1:34.0 | Treat this like the first day of class. |
| 1:37.0 | What are bots? What are bots? |
| 1:41.0 | Well, Brian bots is a term that is sharp for the word robot and they're just simply automated accounts. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CNN, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of CNN and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.