first edit
This is a bit of a complex subject for me to write (premature, dirty data to work with), so in the interest of brevity I’m going to not be particularly careful about my prose. I apologize. If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter article.
Furthermore, the information I have provided has been picked by me personally. I haven’t completely validated some of the more out of the way sites, so reader beware. In particular, GZero media is completely new to me, and while their media accuracy rating has been relatively good, I am still reluctant. While I respect the reporting of many mainstream news organizations, I encourage you to verify.
So RTFA.
Elon Musks’ acquisition of Twitter has been a roller coaster. What started as an apparently impulsive decision has led to an unregulated flood of scams and rightwing content. Claims about saving Twitter, stopping the bots, upholding freedom of speech, and neutrality have not borne out. Advertisers are leaving.
Elon Musk’s X Worth 71.5% Less Than When He Bought Twitter, Says Fidelity
Fidelity, through Rolling Stone
Now the site's marketing prognosis, already dire, is about to get worse. New research from the data firm Kantar indicates that a record 26 percent of advertisers plan to cut spending on Twitter next year, which could be a death sentence for a site whose revenues were already in freefall.1
The Byte
For example, in its first month of Musk’s ownership, a bogus account posted that pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly … would be providing free insulin to customers, this erroneous post temporarily impacted their stock price. Also, a fake Nintendo account was posted having Mario making an impolite gesture.
Nonetheless, content continued to be an issue with advertisers. Media Matters reported 50 of Twitter's top 100 advertisers from 2022, that accounted for $750 million in revenue, had either cut back or stopped advertising entirely on the website. Among them were VW, General Motors …, Diageo, Heineken, Nestle, Coca-Cola …, Mars and Ford.2
Forbes
X May Lose Up to $75 Million in Revenue as More Advertisers Pull Out
Internal documents viewed by The New York Times this week show that the company is in a more difficult position than previously known and that concerns about Mr. Musk and the platform have spread far beyond companies including IBM, Apple and Disney, which paused their advertising campaigns on X last week. The documents list more than 200 ad units of companies from the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, many of which have halted or are considering pausing their ads on the social network.3
New York Times
Aside 1
While researching this topic, I stumbled across some comments from online marketing reddits about high click traffic through Twitter ads. For example
Twitter ad click volume exceedingly high? - r/AskMarketing, 2 years ago
We created a lookalike audience narrowed by several keywords to use for this campaign, and Twitter initially projected the audience size to be ~10,000. (We’re a pretty niche B2B industry.) I set the campaign budget at $1,000 for the month to test it out. After a week it’s spent under $200 and we have almost 9,000 link clicks and 60,000 impressions — though nearly none of these clicks are converting once they get to our landing page. Could definitely be the content on the page or the offer itself not driving interest, but I’m baffled to see this high of traffic to our site. Meanwhile, we’re running almost the same creative on LinkedIn and have seen around 100 clicks in the same timeframe.
I thought advertisers were leaving Twitter? CPMs are still higher than Meta - r/PPC (Pay per click), 1 year ago
What's the deal with these headlines of advertisers leaving Twitter. Why isn't the CPM (clicks per minute) dropping?
We know for certain that third party bots have proliferated on Twitter, and Elon is in a tight spot to justify the investment his creditors made in him. We also have evidence that an incredible minority of Elon’s engagement on the platform comes from bots (“roughly 20% of the accounts interacting with election-related tweets from Musk were, in fact, bots.”), and that Twitter associate xAI has been working on generative AI (Grok) which was intentionally trained to not be “woke.”
Whether Musk is engaging in actual advertising fraud, I cannot clearly determine, but clearly Elon and his version of Twitter have a deep interest in the generative AI and bot agents. If so this would be one good reason why.
I leave these exposed threads for someone better to find the truth. If you find anything, let me know.
Elon Musk's X is boosting election conspiracy theories with AI-powered trending topics 4
The dubious content is spreading in the app’s “explore” section, which says it uses [Grok], to aggregate trending social media topics. … The feature’s placement in X’s explore section gives it prominent digital real estate in the final weeks of the presidential election, in which Musk is backing former President Donald Trump. Its repeated amplification of misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the election follows a string of instances where Musk has personally shared similar ideas, both in live appearances and on his social media.
On Monday, Grok uncritically repeated debunked allegations of wrongdoing related to the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Grok produced a “story for you” titled “Public Scrutiny of Dominion Voting Systems,” which aggregated posts accusing the company of “election rigging” and “fraud.” Dominion has previously denounced similar accusations as lies, and last year Fox News agreed … to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion.
Grok has also spread smears against Harris, the Democratic nominee for president. It created a “story for you” repeating unfounded allegations by X users that she used cocaine in the White House, and it created a “story for you” repeating allegations by X users that she attended parties hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs, who’s facing federal sex-abuse charges. Fact-checkers have said a photo of Combs with fashion designer Misa Hylton was altered to add Harris’ face.
Given that Elon Musk has forwarded his own slew of lies…
“FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” - Post by Elon Musk during Hurricane Helene
How Elon Musk has turned X into a pro-Trump machine
Musk also shared a video that used AI to make it appear that Harris had said things she, in fact, did not — in an apparent violation of X’s manipulated media policy and with only a laughing face emoji to suggest to followers that it was fake.
Musk’s false or misleading claims about US elections on X have been viewed 1.2 billion times, according to an analysis published last week by the Center for Countering Digital Hate
… he hosted Trump for a friendly, 2-plus-hour livestreamed conversation on X, in which he allowed the former president to make at least 20 false claims about everything from crime and immigration to tax cuts, without pushback.
In this article, Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School had this to say about
“The more prominent and trusted the person spreading misinformation, the bigger the damage,” Weiser said. “(Musk) has a giant platform, he has a giant pocketbook, and he has a giant name right now and that is a potent set of tools to deploy to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
“You are the Media now:” How Twitter has shifted right
This article by NBC is a fairly apt description of how Twitter as a platform now favors the digital equivalent of conservative talk show hosts. I’ll simply go through the highlights.
Behind the scenes, Musk made further changes that weakened traditional news media’s influence on the platform while benefiting conservative pundits. He restructured X’s blue check mark verification program that previously signaled that an account was noteworthy, offering the checks to anyone who subscribed to his paid service. He also started sharing revenue with accounts that drove engagement and boosted the engagement of premium members in replies, creating incentives for endless arguing.
University of Washington researchers dubbed the accounts “newsbrokers” in a report this month, noting they often lack journalistic standards and propagate conspiracy theories and partisan views. Musk has personally boosted many of them, such as @libsoftiktok and the account of conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who was suspended from Twitter before Musk bought it. And the accounts have muscle.
Other research has shown conservative content getting a boost. Corsi, of the University of Cambridge, found that “high toxicity tweets and those with right-leaning bias see heightened amplification” on X in a study examining posts about Covid-19 and climate change published in March in the journal EPJ Data Science.
There is one allegation of explicit coordination between X and the Trump campaign. This month, The New York Times reported that, after independent reporter Ken Klippenstein published hacked Trump campaign information related to Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the campaign connected with X to halt the spread of the materials. The newspaper cited two anonymous sources, and NBC News has not independently confirmed the reporting. X, though, blocked links to the hacked material and suspended Klippenstein’s account.
Musk had earlier criticized Twitter’s previous management for what he alleged was similar handling of a story in 2020 by the New York Post about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter executives have defended their actions in 2020 as an attempt to avoid giving incentives for cyberattacks on a presidential campaign, though ex-CEO Jack Dorsey has said that, in hindsight, the company erred.
Documenting X’s rightward shift is now more difficult after Twitter last year increased the cost of its data stream beyond what most academic researchers could afford. But some researchers said in interviews there is ample evidence to show the direction X has been headed in.
At a town hall event in Pennsylvania on Oct. 18, Musk defended X by saying that “there’s not a single account on the left that’s been suppressed: not one, no suspensions, nothing.”
But X has suspended several left-leaning accounts. They include the “White Dudes for Harris” account in July, the “Progressives for Harris” account in August and the account of Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., last year. Those accounts said they did not receive reasons for their suspensions, and they were later reinstated. Some X users also said in July that they were blocked from following @KamalaHQ, the Harris campaign’s main account.
A Pew Research Center survey from March found that rather than upsetting the far right and the far left equally, X generated perceptions that were polarized along party lines: 53% of Republicans said X is mostly good for democracy, while 26% of Democrats said the same. Three years ago, the numbers were flipped: 17% of Republicans said Twitter was mostly good for democracy, against 47% of Democrats.
Democrats also say they are under attack on X: 48% of Democratic users told Pew that getting harassed on X is a major problem, while 15% of Republican users said the same.
And in the past several days, Musk and his super PAC have grown more vulgar and violent in their language about Harris. Musk posted a video in which a gladiator with Trump’s face sword-fights with a warrior with Harris’ face, and the super PAC posted a separate video, later deleted, that called Harris the “C-word” — a double entendre referring both to “communist” and to a vulgar word.
Clearly, Musk’s concept of neutrality is gone, no matter what he thinks he’s doing.
Aside 2:
The University of Washington report seen here, has this to say:
Table 3 presents the engagement metrics for the top nine newsbroker and news outlet accounts. Notably, despite the news outlets tweeting twice as much as the newsbrokers, the level of engagement received by the newsbrokers is significantly higher. Specifically, 346 tweets from nine newsbrokers garnered over 1.2 million retweets, whereas nine news outlets’ 744 tweets received close to 100,000 retweets.
The results become even more noteworthy when we examine traditional news outlets and newsbrokers’ number of followers. According to Table 4, traditional news outlets significantly outnumber newsbrokers regarding followers. These findings align with our previous research, showing that newsbroker accounts with fewer than 1 million followers[3] had higher engagement than traditional news outlets with over 25 million followers. Although it’s commonly believed that a higher number of followers correlates with greater engagement, the breaking news events we observe challenge this assumption. In fact, the three most frequently mentioned accounts have the fewest followers out of the 18 accounts.
As shown in Figure 1, newsbrokers’ tweets (blue) exhibit a wide range of engagement, with some receiving thousands of retweets and others receiving only hundreds. In contrast, news outlets (dark yellow) demonstrate less variability, yet none of their tweets receive a large number of retweets.
In short, there’s research that supports a hypothesis where legacy media outlets are being sandbagged while newsbrokers paradoxically break the clickthrough rate, despite their far smaller reach.
Elon has a lot of animosity towards several outlets, not just limited to figures, but entire industries and swathes of the internet.
Here’s his feud with Substack (which is why I can’t directly imbed his fucking tweet).
Given that we know he’s fine with unethical behavior such as manually fix the algorithm so he got more clicks than Biden, So it’s safe to say that he has a lot of motive and opportunity as a thin-skinned head of the Internet’s town square to do such a thing.
We also have this report by the Washington Post (mentioned by NBC)
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the changes at X have affected the White House’s official account, which now gets about half the views per post that it got a year ago. The Post, which analyzed the top 50 Democratic and 50 Republican congressional accounts, also found that congressional Republicans are far more likely to have viral posts than congressional Democrats — by a ratio of about 5-to-1 this year.
Up next, who’s Elon been hanging out with?
Additional content
Corsi, G. Evaluating Twitter’s algorithmic amplification of low-credibility content: an observational study. EPJ Data Sci. 13, 18 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00456-3
Hickey, D., Schmitz, M., Fessler, D., Smaldino, P. E., Muric, G., & Burghardt, K. (2023). Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 17(1), 1133-1137. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22222
Musk's AI chatbot spread election misinformation, secretaries of state say, Axios
Election officials are outmatched by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine, CNN
AI-Enabled Influence Operations: Safeguarding Future Elections, The Alan Turing Institute Center for Emerging Technology and Security
Musk promised to rid X of bots, but they love his tweets, GZero
Cyabra report, GZero in collaboration with Cyabra (Mentioned by Forbes)
Interestingly, Elon’s attempt to snake out of the Twitter deal relied on commissioning a report from Cyabra to prove the 11% bot figure
I Never Had Bot Problems On Twitter Until Elon Musk, Now They’re Stalking Me, Forbes
We’re all living inside Elon Musk’s misinformation machine now, Vox
Is it already a common knowledge that Musk is farming bots supporting Trump? (self.Twitter)