The whistleblower claims that Twitter has lied about the number of accounts consisting of bots or false identities.
It doesn’t seem all that difficult to understand that Twitter’s claims about genuine, human accounts must be false. If you’ve ever had a fairly large following on Twitter, as I once had, you realize that your number of followers was suspiciously large and took completely impossible leaps from time to time. I discussed this at length some time ago.
But if you don’t believe me, just do a search for “buy Twitter followers.” I just did. One company claims that they will deliver you 100,000 followers in about two weeks for $500, starting in ten minutes, at the rate of several hundred per hour. Those followers may or may not be false identities and/or bots, but the number is obviously a bunch of hanky-panky, and if I sell advertising on my Twitter account based on reaching those 100,000 followers, my claim might be literally correct, but would be bogus.
All of this may be true, but Musk didn’t look into what he was buying any further. In fact, he bought Twitter with the understanding that there already were too many bots on the platform. So to come back and say “I can’t buy this, it has too many bots” is just him waking up and realizing he made a horrible mistake. He can’t unring the bell, though. He waived due diligence to fast track the acquisition because, like Veruca Salt, he wanted it now. Well, good luck with that, man.
I seem to remember Musk’s original pitch being “Twitter has too many bots! I’m going to buy it to fix that!”. To now go “Ah well, Twitter has too many bots. I’m afraid that means I can’t buy it…” seems like a pretty weak excuse!
Yes, twitter is mostly bots botting at bots. Yes, Musk agreed to buy it regardless and can probably be made to go through with it or pay a hefty-to-whopping penalty.
Careful what you wish for, though. A Musk-owned twatter would give Trump his account back, for openers. Then who knows what “enhancements” would come next…
Your business model is based on advertising which is based on real views. You publicly disclose the percentage of real views. That percentage turns out to be an intentional misrepresentation in order to maximize profit. A. People are going to jail B. Advertisers are going to drive twitter to bankruptcy. C. Musk gets twitter at a discount. D. All of the above.
Musk waived due diligence…
Precisely. All that complaining about bots wasn’t until after the fact, after his mouth wrote a check that even his poofy ass didn’t want to cash.
In this case, that may not matter. Musk can argue that due diligence, even if not waived, even if completed thoroughly, could not have revealed what Mudge knew, because Twitter fired him (presumably with the intention of burying his secrets with him).
Twitter also released some other high-level people in the period soon after Musk’s first move. In light of the Mudge revelations, those actions must now be viewed in a different light.
Twitter executives are incentivized based off growing their daily active users but have no incentives to ensure they limit bots. As I’ve gotten older I’ve stopped complaining when people do stuff like this. Everything is incentives. If you create a framework that incentivizes certain behaviors, you can’t then complain when people behave accordingly.
My company actually deals with stuff like this. Our tactics guy estimates that bots make up over 80% of Twitter users.