Some ghouls and or bootlickers on LinkedIn are sharing posts about how :melon-musk: risked a billion dollars for all us common people to see how many bots there are on social media and that was the extent of his game here :michael-laugh:
Why does how many bots there are on Twitter matter tho. Why would that info concern people. Lmao.
I think there’s a pervasive suspicion of many people on the left, on the right, hell even and especially in the liberal ‘center’ that the big social media platforms are subject to insidious, manipulative control (from Intelligence Agencies, the Cultural-Marxists or the Russians respectively). Large, inconspicuous botnets are one plausible way that could happen - and indeed there’s little doubt that a sort of semi-parasitic grey-market industry has sprung up around these platforms, where you can buy organic-looking traffic to whatever piece of content and supposedly attract actual organic traffic through that. Spend money, get attention. However, it isn’t entirely clear how big of a deal overall this stuff really is - if it is a really big deal tho, people argue that it devalues the platform this is happening on, which is the reason for the muskoid line of argument we see today. Of course there’s no way of knowing for sure whether this is just a tactic to lowball the offer or whether it’s simply a way to wriggle out of the deal entirely or whether there’s some other motive behind it
This is an accurate analysis of the prevailing sentiment. But I think people think about it wrong. Sure, bits devalue a platform for an end user. But so do ads, and we see those are ubiquitous as well. We are basically trained as consumers to accept the presence of ads over time. Meanwhile, the strategy with bots seems to be to make them harder to detect rather than more expected. Twitter must understand that part of its value to the owning class is its ability to make bottling just difficult enough that those who are able to do it must pay a premium for it. Therefore they gatekeep their bots to be primarily for the wealthy.
And honestly, the short format of tweets and the fact that there are so many genuine users whose use of language isn’t traditionally fluent makes it harder for the average user to detect NLG. I mean no offense to anyone who speaks a second language or isn’t literate by classist standards. It’s just that a lot of relevant research involves telling subjects things like, “your conversation partner is a Russian child who speaks English as a second language”. It allows people to broadly dismiss grammatical errors and focus on the “content” of what is being said. And it works a pretty large amount of the time
