As Elon Musk continues to post polls on Twitter for major policy decisions like the below, our team decided to test the validity of these polls.

This is what happened when we bought votes from bots for less than $100… https://t.co/5iYJloIBFg

Earlier this month, we set up a Twitter account called @VoxPopuliVoxBot to launch a few polls to assess the ability for bots to influence Twitter poll results. https://t.co/0Iaj9eUAhj

We ran one straight-forward poll: Can polls on Twitter be trusted?

For $57 dollars in purchased for-hire bot services, we delivered 26,261 votes in under 24 hours. https://t.co/2kL1LmP4y3

We also tested our ability to influence real live polls.

For $13, we also bought 2,000 votes on both sides of this poll from a recently reinstated white nationalist far-right media personality. https://t.co/aeYvP114U9

Elon Musk has declared victory over bots on Twitter, but our new research shows that “with less than $100, one can buy tens of thousands of votes for Twitter polls using bot-for-hire manipulation services.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/musk-s-frequent-twitter-polls-are-at-risk-of-bot-manipulation

So, “If the for-hire manipulation services were to ramp up their bandwidth, the Accountable Tech researchers estimated it would cost $2,600 to $3,600 to throw a popular poll at that scale.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/musk-s-frequent-twitter-polls-are-at-risk-of-bot-manipulation

As our Executive Director @nicolelgill told @business: “Not only are bots flourishing under Musk, it’s now easier than ever to use bots to manipulate Twitter polls… Twitter is unsafe and open to manipulation by bad actors — including foreign governments.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/musk-s-frequent-twitter-polls-are-at-risk-of-bot-manipulation