What’s a bot or few (million) between friends?
What’s a bot or few (million) between friends?
The ongoing saga of Elon Musk’s on again, off again bid for Twitter and its wider implications.
So, Elon Musk announced that he wish to back out of his bid to buy Twitter and now Twitter is taking him to court to force him to go through with his bid. Implying, of course, that his bid is over the current (and so expected) value of Twitter.
Taking Musk to court means Twitter subjecting themselves to the processes of legal disclosure. Including a key point of public dispute: how many bots are there on Twitter?
Given the role of Twitter in what Jonathan Haidt calls the epistemic industries (media, IT, entertainment, academe) this matters. The highly networked-yet-imitative pattern of rolling outrage and piety-display over whatever is The Current Thing one sees on Twitter leaves the Twitterverse very open to manipulation.
Bots provide a great deal of opportunity for modern agitprop. Hence it rather mattering how bot-heavy Twitter is. Something the court case, if it gets that far, may reveal.
That it is remarkably easy to generate an apparent Twitter-storm with surprisingly few accounts reinforces the above. (If you are ever inflicted by a Twitter-storm, the first trick is to count the actual number of accounts involved: it is likely to be far smaller than it appears.)
That asset markets are going through some turmoil because of the combination of soaring food and energy prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting Western sanctions, demand-side inflation in the US (and more supply-side issues in the EU), along with a looming, potentially-massive, debt crisis in the developing world (with Sri Lanka being the most exposed, and hence the first domino in a spiralling crisis), may also be playing into Musk’s apparent wish to back-out of his bid.
Either way, what can only be described as the public freak-out which accompanied Musk’s original bid for Twitter was rather striking and revealing. The spectacle led me to write an essay, once again posted on Helen Dale’s Substack, which is a survey of media dynamics, the long-term historical context, the effect of feminisation on institutions and a series of related matters.