Tech Expert Says Musk's 'Bot' Issue vs Twitter Is Bogus Claim

When asked to comment on the news that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, was considering a bid for Twitter, Charles Warzel, editor of The Atlantic's weekly Galaxy Brain, referred to Musk as a "master of pseudo-events."

Photo Insert: Musk is obsessed with bots, which he has used to play the game of dealing-and-quitting with Twitter.

“Musk commandeers the attention, legions speculate,” Warzel wrote. “But ultimately, we end up where we started. The only winner is Musk.”

Musk is obsessed with bots, according to Warzel in his July 13, 2022 post for Galaxy Brain, which he has used to play the game of dealing-and-quitting with Twitter.

“I’d like to talk about Elon Musk’s obsession with bots and how it actually illustrates the ways he is an extremely shallow thinker when it comes to online dynamics. In short, Elon’s bot obsession is like Facebook-addled Boomer behavior. Musk’s bot excuse is obvious bullshit."

"There is not a whisper of evidence [for the bot claim], no hint that there might be evidence, no acknowledgment that a reasonable reader of this letter might want to see evidence," Bloomberg's Matt Levine noted over the weekend.

Musk appears to be preoccupied with the idea that Twitter is filled with fake accounts and that the influx of bots constitutes an existential threat to the site.

The first obvious reason Musk is interested in phony accounts is that he has more than 100 million followers on the network, which means that he has a lot of non-human accounts following him.

According to a recent Slate piece, some estimates, more than two-thirds of Elon Musk’s Twitter followers are bots or spam accounts.” According to another research firm, the percentage is 70% of all his followers.

“I would venture a guess that it’s not the bot stuff that really grinds Musk’s gears. I don’t deny that he’s encountering automated crap on the regular, but the truth about bots is that they aren’t very sophisticated. Bots are, by nature, a volume game. Their utility is to flood the zone momentarily and render mentions or threads useless for a short time. They can briefly artificially inflate a hashtag or name and get it to trend. This is annoying, and in certain instances it can definitely have a negative effect. An automated harassment campaign can temporarily silence somebody or get something awful or hurtful or defamatory to trend. But Twitter has also gotten much better at stamping out these automated accounts,” Warzel concluded.

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