Fake Twitter
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Matt Levine's take. Nice little tidbit at the end there, which I had forgotten about.
“It is all going to get so much dumber,” I wrote yesterday, about Elon Musk’s efforts to get out of his deal to buy Twitter Inc. by complaining about bots. Seventy-three minutes later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted this:
Today I’m investigating Twitter for potentially misleading Texans on the number of its “bot” users. I have a duty to protect Texans if Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue.
The press release is … so dumb?
Twitter has received intense scrutiny in recent weeks over claiming in its financial regulatory filings that fewer than 5% of all users are bots, when they may in fact comprise as much as 20% or more. The difference could dramatically affect the cost to Texas consumers and businesses who transact with Twitter.
To address this concern, Attorney General Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to investigate whether Twitter’s reporting on real versus fake users is “false, misleading, or deceptive” under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The CID requires Twitter to turn over documents related to how it calculates and manages its user data and how these numbers relate to Twitter’s advertising businesses. Twitter has until June 27 to respond to Attorney General Paxton’s Demand.
To be clear, Twitter has claimed that bots are fewer than 5% of “monetizable daily active users” (not “all users”) for eight years, and the “intense scrutiny in recent weeks” consists entirely of Elon Musk claiming, with no evidence, that there are a lot of bots because he regrets agreeing to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share just before a market crash. This is a regulatory investigation entirely for the purposes of trolling: Paxton is harassing Twitter because (1) Musk moved to Texas, (2) Musk announced, like two weeks ago, that he’s a Republican, (3) Musk has a passionate fan base on Twitter, and (4) Musk is trying to rile up that fan base against Twitter by complaining about bots. So Paxton is happy to hitch himself to that: If he harasses Twitter on Musk’s behalf, he will endear himself to Musk’s fans online, which seems valuable for an elected official though not, of course, for his constituents, or for the rule of law. The fact that this is all completely fake is beside the point, as is the fact that Paxton himself is currently under indictment for felony securities fraud. This is not how one wants one’s democracy to be going!
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Maybe it's fake. Maybe it's not.
Pardon me, while I laugh my ass off.
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Can someone 'splain this to me?
I'm an old geezer, so please type really slow.
I understand that one can create a 'bot to do things.
How, exactly, does that work on social media, like Twitter. After all, you have to create an account, then a password, then verify.
Then, you have to have the bot find specific stuff...etc.
I really don't get it. Please type slowly.
