Elon Musk Keeps Lying About One Very Specific Thing
Reading Time: 5 minutesEven his supporters should be fed up with this., Elon Musk keeps making ludicrous claims about bots and spam on Twitter.
Even before Elon Musk lit a match under a pile of money and agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share last April, he was talking a lot about bots. ‘If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!’ he tweeted one day. Four days after that, Musk inked a contract to buy the company. His statement in the big press release started with a line about how ‘free speech’ (such as Musk sees it) is ‘the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square.’ But spam got high billing, too. Musk listed ‘defeating the spam bots’ and ‘authenticating all humans’ as goals.
Did he really mean it? It’s impossible to say. Musk had nearly 100 million followers back then, and has many more now. The replies to anything he posts are a digital war zone. In addition to being a convenient place to find a lot of the most annoying people on the internet, the area underneath a Musk tweet is surely a good place to find spam. Given that Musk has a challenging time looking away from the site he bought—that’s part of why he bought it!—he’s probably seen more spam on Twitter than just about anyone. So it may have been a sincere goal, when he first laid it out, to eradicate bots from his new property. Every platform where people can post anything is worried, at least a bit, about online garbage.
But ever since then, nearly everything he’s said about bots has been … just clearly not true in the slightest. You could pick any number of bones about Musk’s leadership, not the least of which is that it has sucked on pure business terms and destroyed the company’s value. Musk says a lot of things that do not seem like they’re on the level, but because support of and opposition to Musk on Twitter have become politically coded positions, it’s become hard to pin him down. Musk decides to troll LGBTQ+ users by declaring a widely used term is a slur? He’s got people to cheer for him, because those people don’t like trans people. But Musk’s constant lying about Twitter’s bot situation should be different. Nobody likes bots, and Musk has spent many months concocting ludicrous claims about them. Everyone should be annoyed. When he tried to get out of buying Twitter, he said bots were rampant. Since being forced to follow through on his purchase, he has claimed the opposite. Neither position has been honest. Fourteen months after Musk made his deal, and nine after he took over, something has become clear about his public statements: If he’s talking about bots, he is absolutely full of it, and nobody should believe him.
The first bot lie Musk told was the one he used to try to get out of the deal. Recall that when Musk made his play for Twitter, and when he succeeded, he portrayed himself as champing at the bit to fight a bot war. Yes, Twitter had some big number of bots, Musk acknowledged, though it was hard to nail down the exact number for reasons Twitter’s old management explained. Musk was not just OK with bots being on Twitter. He was buying Twitter, he said, so that he could fight the bots. It was a feature of the deal, not a bug.
Within a few weeks, Musk realized what should have been obvious on the day he signed the deal: He had messed up. He was not just overpaying for Twitter at a $44 billion valuation. He was overpaying for an ungovernable platform that nobody should want to own, which could easily (and did) become a headache for the car company that generates his cataclysmic wealth. But the contract Musk signed was a tricky devil, and his Hail Mary of choice was to argue that, actually, Twitter had an enormous bot problem that it had understated to him. It was a wildly transparent charade.
Musk’s effort to get out of the deal started in the spring and rolled well into October. It failed because Twitter’s lawyers planned for the eventuality that he’d try something exactly like he did. Musk gave up the fight just before a Delaware business court trial that he was probably going to lose.
The second bot lie Musk told stemmed from the first one’s ineffectiveness. When Musk took over Twitter and started acting childishly, advertisers disliked it. They still dislike it, as the New York Times reported a recent 59 percent plunge in Twitter’s year-over-year ad sales. Advertising was about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue when it was a public company, and Musk tanked the advertising business. That left him in need of another revenue stream, and the big one he settled on was paid subscriptions to Twitter Blue. The $8 blue check mark and priority placement in replies were Musk’s answer.
In a funny argument with Stephen King, who did not want to pay to retain his check mark, Musk first told the truth: ‘We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers.’ Indeed, especially given that the new Twitter had alienated so many advertisers. The lie came next, when Musk said that paid verification on Twitter was ‘the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.’
It doesn’t pass the sniff test. Does requiring payment for an account make it less likely that someone will use it to run a scheme? It could, if the person fears losing eight bucks when the account gets banned. And maybe, by prioritizing tweets by paid users, Musk really could make it harder for spam tweets to find life in the platform’s search results or replies to tweets.
But it also might cut the other way, as scammers could try to trade on the (now paper-thin) veneer of legitimacy that comes from the blue check mark’s history as a symbol that an account was notable. It’s an academic question, because only a tiny fraction of Twitter users pay for the subscription, and there’s nothing that prevents a would-be scammer from just opening a free account.
Twitter Blue has not actually gotten anywhere near majority adoption, and the bullish theory of its potential deterrence of spam has not been borne out. I’ve noticed an uptick in crypto and get-rich-quick direct messages, but those existed before. A fun new innovation in my Twitter experience has been the appearance of porn spam under huge numbers of tweets, something I rarely encountered before. To the 20-year-old woman in see-through orange lingerie under lots of my tweets, asking me if I ‘want some’ of what she’s offering: I wish you the best of luck. Another day, another dollar.
The third bot lie, which Musk tells now, emerges from some mixture of the other two not working and an apparent difficulty admitting that anything he does is anything less than a smashing success. At a recent Wall Street Journal event, Musk, the paper reported, said Twitter ‘had eliminated at least 90 percent of scams’ on the platform. It’s not entirely clear what that even means, and it’s even less clear how Musk could measure that. If he’s referring to spambots, or to accounts sending phishing links trying to get someone to deposit Ethereum somewhere, then it certainly doesn’t seem that way.
There’s no evidence, in fact, that anyone other than Musk can see that says Twitter has achieved any significant wins in his long-promised crusade against bots. One possibility is that Musk is a singular force of personality and business acumen, and that he has managed to beat these spam accounts in ways that only he and his crack team can measure.
Another possibility is that somewhere in the course of nuking the Twitter staff’s headcount to less than half of what it used to be, Musk made it a little bit harder for the company to deal with its spammiest accounts. And maybe offering an $8 optional subscription that a small handful of users paid for did not prevent people from throwing their bot armies at Twitter. None of us have Musk’s brain, so none of us will ever know.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/musk-twitter-bots-spam.html
Ref: slate
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