Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A6919686639518683136
Los Angeles Times #Twitter #bots helped build the cult of #ElonMusk and #Tesla. But who’s creating them https://lnkd.in/ep7gksPj : #Financial #Markets #Stock #Prices #Twitter #Bots
In early Nov. 2013, the news wasn’t looking great for #Tesla. A series of reports had documented instances of Tesla #ModelS sedans catching on fire, causing the #electric #carmaker’s #share #price to tumble.
Then, on evening of Nov. 7, within a span of 75 minutes, eight #automated #Twitter #accounts came to life and began publishing #positive #sentiments about Tesla. Over next 7 years, they would post more than 30,000 such #tweets.
With more than 500 #million #tweets sent per day across the #network, that output represents a drop in the ocean. But preliminary research from David A. Kirsch, a professor at University of Maryland – Robert H. Smith School of Business, concludes that activity of this sort by so-called #bots has played a significant part in the #stock of the #future narrative that propelled #Tesla’s #market #value to altitudes loftier than any #traditional #financial #analysis could justify.
A #Twitter #bot is a #fake #account, programmed to scour the #socialmedia site for specific #posts or #news content — #Musk’s posts, for example — and respond with relevant, preprogrammed tweets: “Tremendous long term growth prospects” or “Why Tesla stock is rallying today” or “Tesla’s Delivery Miss Was ‘Meaningless.’
Researchers collected and reviewed #Tesla-related tweets from 2010, when the #company went #public, to the end of 2020.
Over that period, Tesla lost $5.7 billion, even as its #stock soared and Musk became one of the richest humans on the planet; his net worth is estimated at $275 billion. #Operational #results can’t justify anything close to the company’s $1-#trillion #market #value, based on any kind of traditional #stock-#pricing #metric.
Using a software program called #Botometer that #social #media researchers use to distinguish #bot #accounts from #human #accounts, the pair found that a fifth of the #volume of #tweets about Tesla were bot-generated. While any direct link between #bot #tweets and #stock #prices has yet to be determined, the researchers found enough “smoke” to keep their project going.
Over the 10-year study period, of about 1.4 million #tweets from the top 400 #accounts posting to the “cashtag” $TSLA, 10% were produced by #bots. Of 157,000 tweets posted to the #hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from #bots, the research showed.
Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot #accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s #stock appreciated more than 2%.
Global Risk Management Network LLC: Silicon Valley-Wall Street-Pentagon-Global Digital CEOs Networks
