Elon Musk's alarm over Twitter bots takes the lid off advertising frauds

Twitter claimed that less than 5 per cent of its accounts are fake, but global research agencies say it is at least 3x the quoted number

Elon Musk’s decision to drop the idea of acquiring Twitter over purported under-reporting of fake accounts due to the use of bots has opened a can of worms on what is a growing and crucial problem —advertisers who put in money based on these falsified numbers (which is the mainstay revenue of these platforms) are making losses; they are paying for bots in the guise of viewers.

mFilterIt — a global digital and advertising (ad) fraud detection and protection company in India —  says search engines like Google have the lowest average ad fraud rate of 10-12 per cent, based on