On Friday, Elon Musk bowed out of his attempt to take over Twitter.
And Twitter stock plummeted over 10 percent in trading on Monday.
Citing the woke corporate social media company’s non-disclosure of information that he had been requesting for many, many weeks, Mr.Musk withdrew his offer.
The big issue, here, is the possibility that Twitter is over-valued because the company has allowed “bots” to proliferate. That is, accounts run by computers and AIs and scammers who create accounts and then just crank out content that have no value for advertising — which is how the company makes most of its money.
“Twitter claims that only 5 percent of its monetizable daily active user (mDAU) base consists of bots,” explains Nicholas Dolinger at The Epoch Times, “but Musk has argued that the number is much higher, and that Twitter, in misrepresenting the total number of bots, has misled him in such a way as to void the agreement.”
The best part of the story may be the “meme” Musk shared about it, “implying that Twitter would face embarrassment at having to disclose information about the prevalence of bots on the platform in court.”
Twitter user @ZanderfromNOLA offers an image that shows that bot problem: multiple accounts for healthcare professionals all saying the exact same thing, word for word, pushing the COVID vaxxes. It could be a propaganda campaign from Big Pharma. Or it could be the CIA. Or China. Or even Russia! Who knows? But the wealth of duplicate and obviously suspect content on the platform suggests that Musk’s initial offering of $44 billion was way too generous.
The humiliation that Twitter has suffered may be well-deserved.
But will humiliation nudge along any decent reforms?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “All a-Twitter”
If Twitter sues, discovery is going to be veeery interesting.