𝕏 / Twitter / X, the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter / "MUSK OWNS TWITTER"

[mindlessobserver]

But the ultimate question remains: can we still say Nigger on Twitter?

Only at Clarence Thomas.

 

[Rei is shit]

> Elon offers to buy Twitter.
> Leftists everywhere melt down, attempt to stop him.
> Twitter refuses to cooperate in being transparent about their main user base.
> Elon retracts offer.
> Twitter acts like a jilted lover and threatens to sue, not realizing that all the shit they failed to cooperate with will actually be discovered during such a lawsuit, but they can't stop acting like spergs to realize how stupid a move this is.

Maybe Elon is the real chess master all along?

He talked about making his own social network before. If you try to buy twitter first, then maybe you save yourself a bunch of time making something from scratch. Or maybe it turns out to be shit, but you can just kill the deal and in the process kill a possible competitor. All while getting a look at a bunch of useful data.

 

[marvlouslie]

He talked about making his own social network before. If you try to buy twitter first, then maybe you save yourself a bunch of time making something from scratch. Or maybe it turns out to be shit, but you can just kill the deal and in the process kill a possible competitor. All while getting a look at a bunch of useful data.

I dunno, dude. This entire thing has just been fucking hilarious to watch unfold. Trump being pissed that Elon retracted the offer doesn't make sense, because that would mean they'd be competitors in the same space. You'd think he'd be happy.

 

[I (Don't) Have A Gun]

> Elon offers to buy Twitter.
> Leftists everywhere melt down, attempt to stop him.
> Twitter refuses to cooperate in being transparent about their main user base.
> Elon retracts offer.
> Twitter acts like a jilted lover and threatens to sue, not realizing that all the shit they failed to cooperate with will actually be discovered during such a lawsuit, but they can't stop acting like spergs to realize how stupid a move this is.

Maybe Elon is the real chess master all along?

Oh I think things are dramatically more complicated than that.
Now I haven't followed it too closely but it seems that Elon made a offer and Twitter accepted that offer. At that point there isn't much room for Elon to pull out.
Now it really depends on the specifics, specifically the offer that Elon made. I don't believe that offer had any pull out conditions regarding the user base, the numbers of bots or some such so he arguably has no legal grounds to not go through with the deal. If he doesn't then there's I believe a billion dollar penalty on Elon, or twitter can even take him to court to try and force him to buy them.

Now I might be wrong on this, but I imagine we'll see a lot more legal drama in the future.

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

Oh I think things are dramatically more complicated than that.
Now I haven't followed it too closely but it seems that Elon made a offer and Twitter accepted that offer. At that point there isn't much room for Elon to pull out.
Now it really depends on the specifics, specifically the offer that Elon made. I don't believe that offer had any pull out conditions regarding the user base, the numbers of bots or some such so he arguably has no legal grounds to not go through with the deal. If he doesn't then there's I believe a billion dollar penalty on Elon, or twitter can even take him to court to try and force him to buy them.

Now I might be wrong on this, but I imagine we'll see a lot more legal drama in the future.

Thanks for the Reddit tier unfounded speculation because you have no idea how the business world works, or read anything regarding this specific case. Really helpful and informative.

 

[Balr0g]

Oh I think things are dramatically more complicated than that.
Now I haven't followed it too closely but it seems that Elon made a offer and Twitter accepted that offer. At that point there isn't much room for Elon to pull out.
Now it really depends on the specifics, specifically the offer that Elon made. I don't believe that offer had any pull out conditions regarding the user base, the numbers of bots or some such so he arguably has no legal grounds to not go through with the deal. If he doesn't then there's I believe a billion dollar penalty on Elon, or twitter can even take him to court to try and force him to buy them.

Now I might be wrong on this, but I imagine we'll see a lot more legal drama in the future.

Now imagine they go to court over this and this gets live streamed over the world. I see nick rekieta raking in the super chats already. And maybe we finally get a real insight into how Twitter actually works (Spoiler: it doesn't)

 

[AnOminous]

Thanks for the Reddit tier unfounded speculation because you have no idea how the business world works, or read anything regarding this specific case. Really helpful and informative.

Fraud in the inducement is nearly always a reason to rescind.

I find it questionable that Musk can convincingly argue that he was deceived by the fake accounts when he was publicly discussing them before the deal was consummated. Generally fraud of the sort that justifies rescinding a contract requires not merely proving a false statement. I think that part is pretty easy to prove. He needs to show also that he reasonably relied on it.

For instance, suppose you bought a house but sometime before the final purchase, you discover the house has a cracked foundation, and thus worth considerably less than you thought when you agreed on the purchase. Except in Elon Musk's case, he already knew about the cracked foundation.

Musk would have to show the userbase is considerably more worthless than he thought at first, and that this was due to deception, and that he relied on these deceptive claims in reaching his estimate of Twitter's actual value. It is also significantly more difficult for a sophisticated market actor like Musk to claim he was bamboozled, especially by a fact he had publicly discussed well before making the deal.

On the good side, he limited his exposure to the one billion penalty. He might not be able to get out of that, but he can almost certainly get out of the contract if he's willing to take that haircut. Twitter, though, may crash with no survivors, and I think that's what Musk is counting on. They have a lot more to lose than he does now.

I have to give it to him, though, this is a huge hoot and only an immensely wealthy person could pull this level of shit, and tell me if you were handed Musk levels of money, you wouldn't go do crazy shit like this too.

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

For instance, suppose you bought a house but sometime before the final purchase, you discover the house has a cracked foundation, and thus worth considerably less than you thought when you agreed on the purchase. Except in Elon Musk's case, he already knew about the cracked foundation.

This is not the case, if you read the SEC release over his retraction Musk is arguing that Twitter is intentionally trying to hide information from him by various means, first by rate limiting his API access and putting in artificially low daily limits. Twitter's employees were purposefully sabotaging any effort for Musk to truly verify Daily Active Users nor would they tell him how they managed to get to the original numbers in the first place.

While Twitter has provided some information, that information has come with strings attached, use limitations or other artificial formatting features, which has rendered some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisors. For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer “APIs” first explicitly requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 Letter, those APIs contained a rate limit lower than what Twitter provides to its largest enterprise customers. Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.

Additionally, those APIs contained an artificial “cap” on the number of queries that Mr. Musk and his team can run regardless of the rate limit—an issue that initially prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from completing an analysis of the data in any reasonable period of time. Mr. Musk raised this issue as soon as he became aware of it, in the first paragraph of the June 29 Letter: “we have just been informed by our data experts that Twitter has placed an artificial cap on the number of searches our experts can perform with this data, which is now preventing Mr. Musk and his team from doing their analysis.” That cap was not removed until July 6, after Mr. Musk demanded its removal for a second time.

SEC Briefing

 

[AnOminous]

This is not the case, if you read the SEC release over his retraction Musk is arguing that Twitter is intentionally trying to hide information from him by various means, first by rate limiting his API access and putting in artificially low daily limits. Twitter's employees were purposefully sabotaging any effort for Musk to truly verify Daily Active Users nor would they tell him how they managed to get to the original numbers in the first place.

We don't know that's not the case, we just know what Musk is claiming. I agree they're obviously fucking with him, but he's obviously also fucking back. I'm not convinced he was ever actually substantially deceived and it's really up to him to prove not just reliance, but reasonable reliance on facts it is clear he had serious doubts about before even entering the transaction.

The fact they're dragging their feet about this obviously raises serious doubts, and if Musk is correct, the bogus accounts situation may be way worse than Musk (or their shareholders) knew.

 

[marvlouslie]

I have to give it to him, though, this is a huge hoot and only an immensely wealthy person could pull this level of shit, and tell me if you were handed Musk levels of money, you wouldn't go do crazy shit like this too.

Only someone with "fuck you" money would be able to pull off this massive troll. It's been fucking hilarious watching all the sperging from the sidelines. At first I was kind of optimistic about the deal going through and him actually cleaning house. Now I just want to kick back and watch the fallout from it not really giving a shit anymore.

 

[SBG]

Food for thought:
When it comes to bot farms it seems to be common they come up with a setup like this, whole rows of phones all wired up together, so each has their own unique phone number, email address, and so on. So in order to figure out they were bots you'd have to have information regarding things like their geolocation and judge whether they were tweeting like a regular person ever using either an algorithm and/or a human (since you can't say everyone living in an apartment building isn't human even if you think so).



Which seems significant because the twitter firehose data doesn't have stuff like that, it wouldn't have information about IP addresses, geolocation, email addresses, or phone numbers. It is just a stream of public tweets as though you were following everyone that exists on twitter at the same time.

1. The fire hose offers data about a tweet’s content, its time stamp and how it was posted (e.g., an iPhone). It does not specify whether the account that posted a tweet is a human or a computer, and it doesn’t include account-specific details like a phone number or IP address that might be useful in determining that.
2. The fire hose doesn’t account for “lurkers,” or active Twitter users who consume content—and may even click on ads—but who don’t post tweets. Any analysis of fire hose data will be missing a key cohort of real, active Twitter users. Measuring spam bots will always require a sample of accounts, but only looking at accounts that post publicly could lead to flawed results.

It could be that he wants to check how many times people are just repeating the same messages and use that as evidence of bots, but then that runs into the problem that some people are doing that for memes like this. They all repeat the exact same message, occasionally with pictures that may not necessarily work with the meme.

 

[Autistic Joe]

I agree they're obviously fucking with him, but he's obviously also fucking back.

And if there's one thing we can all agree Elon is pretty good at......

 

[MuuMuu Bunnylips]

And if there's one thing we can all agree Elon is pretty good at......

He's also not very good at pulling out...

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1546344529460174849

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

The fact they're dragging their feet about this obviously raises serious doubts, and if Musk is correct, the bogus accounts situation may be way worse than Musk (or their shareholders) knew.

I have always viewed the marketing industry as based off of bogus metrics, but since every corporation uses them it the whole system gets a pass. Twitter likely has something on the order of 20-30% bots, something that has to be ordered on a grade, a news service account like @nytimes is a "bot" but is considered an acceptable one, then you have your generic spambots like these here:

Then you have the more murky and difficult to observe bots using stuff like GPT-3 or GPT-4. These are the most insidious type because they come across as human and never post the same content, they're even posting "on-topic" for leftist causes, these bots get specialized follow lists for regional stuff and instructions are disseminated to produce tweets "write a pro-control tweet" to the GPT back end during campaigns.

 

[Aidan]

Food for thought:
When it comes to bot farms it seems to be common they come up with a setup like this, whole rows of phones all wired up together, so each has their own unique phone number, email address, and so on. So in order to figure out they were bots you'd have to have information regarding things like their geolocation and judge whether they were tweeting like a regular person ever using either an algorithm and/or a human (since you can't say everyone living in an apartment building isn't human even if you think so).

View attachment 3478082

Which seems significant because the twitter firehose data doesn't have stuff like that, it wouldn't have information about IP addresses, geolocation, email addresses, or phone numbers. It is just a stream of public tweets as though you were following everyone that exists on twitter at the same time.


It could be that he wants to check how many times people are just repeating the same messages and use that as evidence of bots, but then that runs into the problem that some people are doing that for memes like this. They all repeat the exact same message, occasionally with pictures that may not necessarily work with the meme.


View attachment 3478125View attachment 3478128View attachment 3478134

Algorithms are pretty decent at detecting bots based on text and timestamps alone, any extra data is just icing on the cake. Further, Twitter says in their privacy policy that they collect way more data than is in the "fire hose." The "fire hose" is just what's they make publicly available, what they have access to would make bot detection a lot easier and more interesting. Since I imagine most real users use the app on their phone, it also serves to mark them as humans very easily.
I can confidently say Twitter not only has capability to identify bots with reasonable accuracy, they sell API access to companies who run thousands of bot accounts to influence trends. I'd say it's just marketing companies but they will use their Twitter bot armies for whatever anyone wants as long as the price is right.

The bot farms you saw with the phone setup are not how they post, they just use that to make account after account in an assembly-line-ish manner, btw. After an account is logged in and verified by the phone it can be posting from any device. Maybe less sophisticated operations send out messages to the accounts from phones in the 3rd world but due to how copypaste that'd be it'd make the bot detection even easier.


The point being that Twitter, the company, and the people running it, have a better idea than anyone else how infested Twitter is and that's what Elon is getting at. He was trying to buy the company (or so he says) and wanted the actual data, not a gimped dataset that he'd have to conduct the analysis on himself.
And Twitter can't say "Well we don't know" because they have to ban bots, which means they have to detect them somehow.

There's research out there that implies there's a lot of bots on Twitter. If they can do that via skimming or API access then imagine what Twitter can do with the full picture.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere/

 

[SBG]

Algorithms are pretty decent at detecting bots based on text and timestamps alone, any extra data is just icing on the cake. Further, Twitter says in their privacy policy that they collect way more data than is in the "fire hose." The "fire hose" is just what's they make publicly available, what they have access to would make bot detection a lot easier and more interesting. Since I imagine most real users use the app on their phone, it also serves to mark them as humans very easily.
I can confidently say Twitter not only has capability to identify bots with reasonable accuracy, they sell API access to companies who run thousands of bot accounts to influence trends. I'd say it's just marketing companies but they will use their Twitter bot armies for whatever anyone wants as long as the price is right.

The problem is Musk is making his allegations not on what data Twitter has provided him (the private data excluded), but the data twitter has provided him while saying he needs more of his useless data.

That's the problem with Musk's filing, he's arguing that data that's largely useless for determining whether users are bots is necessary to identify bots. Or rather he's arguing even more of the useless data is necessary. I have found it a bit fascinating though that one of the things to come out of all this is that twitter judges whether accounts are bots in their studies is if they seem to be bots in their random samplings. So they're not just relying on an algorithm to judge whether an account is a bot in their study, but a human being.

In the end, both sides in this conflict will come out winners. Musk pulls out billions from twitter that went down 30% over the past six months, while twitter only went down a 10% in that same time frame. Yet Twitter could get a nice cash infusion with a portion of the billion Musk could owe from breaking the merger agreement.

 

[Aidan]

The problem is Musk is making his allegations not on what data Twitter has provided him (the private data excluded), but the data twitter has provided him while saying he needs more of his useless data.

That's the problem with Musk's filing, he's arguing that data that's largely useless for determining whether users are bots is necessary to identify bots. Or rather he's arguing even more of the useless data is necessary. I have found it a bit fascinating though that one of the things to come out of all this is that twitter judges whether accounts are bots in their studies is if they seem to be bots in their random samplings. So they're not just relying on an algorithm to judge whether an account is a bot in their study, but a human being.

In the end, both sides in this conflict will come out winners. Musk pulls out billions from twitter that went down 30% over the past six months, while twitter only went down a 10% in that same time frame. Yet Twitter could get a nice cash infusion with a portion of the billion Musk could owe from breaking the merger agreement.

Oh I misunderstood sorry. Elon trusts his eyes! He knows what he's seen as he's addicted to Twitter.

I thank him for SpaceX and creating a situation where sane people win no matter what.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

This is why he's not buying twitter.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Musk would have to show the userbase is considerably more worthless than he thought at first, and that this was due to deception, and that he relied on these deceptive claims in reaching his estimate of Twitter's actual value.

I actually think there is a non-zero chance of this, There are massive Click-Farms in places like India. I unironically think there is a non zero chance of all Advertisement based Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube ect) being more bots than we would ever think.

Algorithms are pretty decent at detecting bots based on text and timestamps alone, any extra data is just icing on the cake.

the problem is, Twitter is specifically incentivized from not doing as good of a job as they can do because their bottom line is dependent on "Daily Average Users" and if they clean up all the bots that will go down, especially in terms of twitter addicts who don't care about bots..they just want follows and likes.