This just keeps getting better. Who ever thought you could make a soap opera out of a corporate acquisition?
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Hah. Did he mean 100, or did he mean 100!, i.e., about 9.3326e157 (100 factorial).
âMark
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SparkToro and Followerwonk have just published their analysis of fake and spam accounts on Twitter, âSparkToro & Followerwonk Joint Twitter Analysis: 19.42% of Active Accounts Are Fake or Spamâ.
From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90 days. These accounts were randomly selected, by machine, from a set of 130+ million public, active profiles. Our analysis found that 19.42%, nearly four times Twitterâs Q4 2021 estimate, fit a conservative definition of fake or spam accounts (i.e. our analysis likely undercounts). Details and methodology are provided in the full report below.
For the past three years, SparkToro has operated a free tool for Twitter profiles called Fake Followers. Over the last month, numerous media outlets and other curious parties have used the tool to analyze would-be-Twitter-buyer, Elon Muskâs, followers. On Friday, Mr. Musk tweeted that his acquisition of Twitter was âon holdâ due to questions about what percent of Twitterâs users are spam or fake accounts
If youâre on Twitter, try running Fake Followers on your own account. Here is what I get when I run it on my own.
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Does the analysis of your own account identify the specific suspected fake followers?
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Are any of the analyses linear so that they would show changes over time. Specifically, after the Musk takeover became public, many conservatives noticed a significant increase in followers. Did the leftists cut back on shadow banning or did they loose the bots? Or did all sorts of people get drawn to Twitter over Musk and then decide to follow conservatives?
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They do not provide a specific list of fake followers, but do report the following statistics based upon a random sampling of 2000 followers of the account being audited. (I have only 2537 followers, so thatâs most of them). Click to enlarge the image.
There isnât any way I can see to do a historical analysis; the tool analyses the current state of the account retrieved from Twitter after the user grants access to it.
Specifically, after the Musk takeover became public, many conservatives noticed a significant increase in followers. Did the leftists cut back on shadow banning or did they loose the bots? Or did all sorts of people get drawn to Twitter over Musk and then decide to follow conservatives?
I have heard numerous reports of people getting followers back, but I saw no such increase in my own account or more followers being added after the announcement. I do believe that shadow banning and outright banning was dramatically cut back. In any case, more than a dozen accounts that I used to follow back in the day which had âjust disappearedâ magically came back within days of the buy-outâs announcement. I donât know whether these were outright banned accounts which were reinstated or accounts which were shadow-banned and only reappeared in my timeline after the shadow-ban was removed.
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Parag âTweet Apuâ Agrawal melts down in an epic 14-tweet thread (click to view the whole thing) in response to allegations / revelations of Twitter falsifying its spam statistics and thereby scamming its advertisers.
https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576
Elon Musk fires back:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1526250477456965634
Twitter stock is now down 8% on the day, trading below pre-acquisition announcement levels.
Is the Twitter deal dead? Musk seemed to suggest it was, unless he can buy the company for a lower price in light of âbot-gateâ which erupted over the weekend.
Speaking at the âAll Inâ summit, Musk said that a viable deal for Twitter is ânot out of the question,â but at a lower price.
He also challenged the truth and accuracy of Twitterâs public filings.
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In my life, I have never looked forward to an annual shareholder meeting ⌠UNTIL NOW !!!
TWITTER, INC. is hosting a Virtual Stockholder Meeting on Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at 10:00 AM PDT more info here Twitter, Inc. - Annual Meeting of Stockholders
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More manipulation.
I had not signed on to Twitter in a while.
Without signing in I had pretty much only used Twitter to check Musk tweets over the last few months.
I signed in earlier today and just now went to Paragâs page.
On Paragâs page, among suggestions for who to follow, I got a heading âSimilar to Parag Agrawalâ that listed a bunch of people starting with Jack, but no Musk.
Below that was a âSuggested for youâ heading with over half people who made sense (Ben ShapiroâŚ) and less than half random people who may have paid or who are being forced on me (CDC, WHOâŚ).
On my home page, the âSuggested for youâ is similar but not identical.
No Musk anywhere. So I manually entered his name to follow him.
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Today, Elon is going after ESG investing.
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Everythingâs coming up Orwell!
Twitter, 2022-05-19, announces âIntroducing our crisis misinformation policyâ.
Down the line, as we expand our approach, we will enforce around other emergent global crises, informed by the United Nations Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC)âs emergency response framework, and other global humanitarian frameworks.
âŽ
Content moderation is more than just leaving up or taking down content, and weâve expanded the range of actions we may take to ensure theyâre proportionate to the severity of the potential harm. Weâve found that not amplifying or recommending certain content, adding context through labels, and in severe cases, disabling engagement with the Tweets, are effective ways to mitigate harm, while still preserving speech and records of critical global events.
âPreserving speech and recordsââas defined by the United Nationsâright.
The author is this dumbeardâ˘, Yoel Roth, Twitter âHead of Safety and Integrityâ. If I had that job title, I would not go outside without a bag on my head, scraggly beard or none. Iâm beginning to think that with Twitter stock now trading more than 30% below the Elon Musk acquisition bid, theyâre beginning to bet it isnât going to happen and they can return to their previous Ministry of Truth content policies.
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Wonder how they measure something like harm?
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And harm to whom?
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The narratives.
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It seems unlikely that this will end without a circular firing squad of lawsuits.
If the deal collapses, break out the popcorn! There will be shareholder suits against Musk, and shareholder suits against the company. Musk will sue the company. And the company will sue Musk.
The discovery produced by such suits will, undoubtedly, spur suits by advertisers and Twitter users.
Even if Musk reaches a deal at a reduced price, other shareholders will likely sue the company. They might even sue Musk, but that really would be a weak suit. The same factors behind the reduced price will spur the advertiser suits.
Of course, many of these suits have likely already been filed even if only on spec.
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