‘You Are Dead To Me’: Twitter Files Journalist Matt Taibbi Posts Unhinged Messages from Elon Musk https://www.mediaite.com/tech/you-a...aibbi-posts-unhinged-messages-from-elon-musk/
Elon's takeover of Xitter is all going to Xi's plan. Elon Musk’s X allows China-based propaganda banned on other platforms X accused of overlooking propaganda flagged by Meta and criminal prosecutors. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...a-based-propaganda-banned-on-other-platforms/
Musk's loudly bragged about breaking traffic records on X/Twitter during the Superbowl -- trying to impress advertisers. The problem - A whopping 75.85 percent of traffic was fake. The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests These numbers are legitimately shocking https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-bots-fake-traffic This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history. Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk's X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views. However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users. According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake. "I've never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent," CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X's fake traffic data. "I'm amazed…I've never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close." CHEQ's data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to its clients' sites that came from X during Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, Feb. 9 up until the end of Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 11. The data was collected from across CHEQ's 15,000 total clients. It's a small portion of the relevant data, and it's not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend. CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich's company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client's page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website. Most X users who are regularly on the platform can attest to a noticeable uptick in seemingly inauthentic activity in recent months. When a post goes viral on X, its now commonplace to find bots filling the replies with AI-generated responses or accounts with randomly generated usernames spamming a user's mentions with unsolicited "link-in-bio" promotions. Now, there's data which backs up that user experience. Advertisers have also noticed X's bot issues. In a recently published piece in The Guardian, Gene Marks, a small business owner shared his ad campaign results from X. After a small $50 advertising spend, X's analytics shows that his website had received 350 clicks from approximately 29,000 views. However, according to Google Analytics, X wasn't the source of any of the actual traffic his website had received during that time period. In our conversation with Tytunovich, he referenced an often cited stat that roughly half of all internet traffic is made up of bots, and how he's long been skeptical of that data based on what CHEQ itself sees. "We were always the conservative ones," Tytunovich explained regarding CHEQ's approach to fake user data. "We protect a lot of our customers on Google Ads, YouTube, and even TikTok, which I'm not a fan of, and we've always said 50 percent [being fake] is a bit opportunistic." "I almost decided not to go out [and publish the X bot data] because we've never seen anything like it," he said. X has a bot problem unlike anything else seen on competing platforms When X's Super Bowl traffic is compared to other social media platforms during the same time period, the bot issue on Musk's platform appears even more stark. CHEQ also provided data to Mashable pertaining to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In terms of fake traffic, no other platform came close to X's nearly 76 percent. Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake. Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic. And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake. Tytunovich tells Mashable that it's not out of the ordinary to see spikes in fake traffic on social media platforms during big events like U.S. elections. However, he has never seen anything close to X's 75.85 percent. And, unfortunately for X, its bot problem goes beyond the big game too. CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits. But, X once again fared the worst. Of the 759,000 visits from X, 31.82 percent of that traffic was determined to be fake. Tytunovich, who has met with Musk previously and pushed the X owner to address the bot problem, stressed to Mashable that his company cannot tell how many fake users are on social media platforms themselves. The data only details how many bots came to CHEQ's clients' sites from those platforms. However, as Tytunovich explained, his company has a wide range of clients, including large, Fortune 500 companies, and this fake activity coming from X was seen across the board regardless of industry or market. Mashable reached out to X for information or a statement but received an automated message from the company reading "Busy now, please check back later." An Elon Musk problem X didn't always have a bot problem of this magnitude, according to CHEQ, something Tytunovich demonstrated by providing Mashable with data from last year's Super Bowl. During the comparable weekend in February 2023, fake traffic from the platform then-known as Twitter only accounted for 2.81 percent out of 159,000 visits. That's around 72 percent less than this year's game. Last year's Super Bowl occurred just a few months after Elon Musk acquired the platform in late October of 2022. And a lot has changed on X between last February and today under Musk's leadership. The platform was still known as Twitter then. Notable users still had their legacy verified blue checkmarks. Only around 200,000 to 300,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue, which is now called X Premium. X's creator monetization program, where paying X Premium subscribers can make money off of ads displaying on their content, did not yet exist. All of these changes can factor into X's current bot problem. In addition, since Musk's take over, 80 percent of the company's Trust and Safety team's engineers have been laid off, along with half of the company's content moderators. Thousands of employees have been laid off across the company. X has struggled with advertisers since Musk's takeover. Big brands and major companies like Disney have suspended ad campaigns on the platform due to hate speech and pro-Nazi content proliferating on X, as well as antisemitic comments made by Musk himself. According to a Bloomberg report last month, X is planning to open a Trust and Safety center in Austin, Texas and is hiring 100 employees to work in that department in order to address some of advertisers' concerns. But, X's problems clearly go well beyond the type of content being posted by real human beings. Advertisers typically pay social media companies based on impressions and/or clicks on their advertisements. And based on this traffic data, advertisers could potentially be paying Musk and company for visits from an audience consisting mostly of bots.
Just Elon promoting himself again using fake Twitter accounts. ‘You’re an amazing father, Elon’: Musk accused of running burner on X again—and nuking account who outed him The account has repeatedly praised Tesla and Musk for being an 'amazing father.' https://www.dailydot.com/debug/elon-musk-adrian-dittmann-x-burner-reaction/ Users on X believe that platform owner Elon Musk has been secretly operating a burner account in order to lavish praise on himself. The allegation gained traction over the weekend after the popular comedic user known as “Liam Nissan” brought attention to the claim. Nissan and others said that the user “Adrian Dittmann,” which regularly gives acclaim to Musk and his companies, actually belongs to the billionaire. The matter was made only worse when Nissan’s account, which boasted well over 250,000 followers, went offline shortly after. While many have accused Musk of suspending the account, a notice of Nissan’s profile simply states that it no longer exists. Nissan, who is known to regularly criticize Musk, had also been suspended from X earlier this month for allegedly violating the platform’s terms of service. The Dittmann account garnered widespread attention earlier this month after appearing in an X Spaces audio chat with Infowars host Alex Jones. Joined by conspiracy theorist David Icke, who believes that the world’s top leaders are actually lizards, Jones and his guest both questioned whether they were actually talking to Musk based on the individual’s eerily similar speech. Others, though, suggested the voice on the Spaces could have been a cloning effort using AI. Musk called it “next level,” although Dittmann denied he used AI, saying that was his voice. Users began examining Dittmann’s account and found that he often replied to Musk’s official account. In one example, Dittmann responded to a tweet from Musk alongside his child by proclaiming: “You’re an amazing father, Elon. Your kids are very lucky to have you.” In other examples, Dittmann is seen responding to Musk with applause for making jokes. The account also hypes Tesla, Musk’s electric car company. The hashtag #FreeLiamNissan has been trending ever since. Musk has also been accused of hypocrisy given his repeated claims of supporting free speech on X. This is not the first time Musk has been accused of operating a burner account. In April 2023, Musk shared a screenshot of his profile which appeared to expose a secondary account. The account, which posed as a toddler, also frequently interacted with Musk’s main profile. Musk has not taken credit for either account.
Hey, I just saw this thread. Wasn't Musk supposed have bankrupted X by now? I mean, didn't folks here tell us that Twitter would be dead and over with? Maybe they just meant the brand name?
For all those that bemoan people using written immigration refugee law being used by the recent surge; adjusting status when having lived in the US "illegally" is near impossible short of marriage or service, so the Musk brothers likely violated federal law or lied (also a federal violation).
The huge majority of Musk's X/Twitter is just bots. Twitter is becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods the internet https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...blem-as-ai-spam-floods-the-internet/103498070