Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter’s many fake accounts

By MATT O’BRIEN
AP Technology Writer

Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk. He pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!” He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it. The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads.