I have to think that FB, and much of the rest of the internet advertising industry, would not like the precedent of having to back up your claims as to how many real people are seeing the ads you're charging for.
This precedent does exist in the form of something called MRC accreditation[1], named after the Media Ratings Council[2].
There are media buyers (and the respective advertisers that they represent) that will refuse to be billed for media delivered via non-accredited platforms[3].
Facebook did feel some pressure after reports of inflated counting of video ads, then in response agreed to a third party audit (to become MRC accredited)[4]. It seems like they might be in jeopardy again[5]?
Pinterest is currently in the fire for this as well[6].
This and the Elon thing is funny because like I don't think they have thought far enough to consider the full implications what they want to say here: that every human who uses Twitter is in fact in a kind of weird solipsism, and they are on some kind of crusade to wake people up from it.
People who use Twitter feel quite assured, I think, that there is usually another person behind the pfp; but Musk and now Texas are kinda wanting to suggest that that sense is often an illusion.
Honestly, if anything in my life is some kind of Truman show, its probably Twitter, so I definitely get how this angle can work for them. The kind of behavior the platform produces is sometimes more easily explained that way I think.
Then the next thought is just: why not make a Twitter clone that is purposefully this way? Every user logs into their own twitter where there are only a million bots with them, interacting with the user and themselves. It could be more finely tuned to the user's neuroses, so the ads can sell more. The overhead for content policing would shrink to zero, because everyone is just in their own sandbox anyway. The ephemeral interactions with random people would probably stay the same honestly, depending, I guess, on whether the real user knows the full situation or not, but I suspect even then it wouldn't matter. You can keep the news stories the same.
I am mostly joking but I do think people would use this. You could also pay more to have the experience of being a big twitter account/influencer. Even if you know they are bots, if the UX was strong enough it wouldnt matter, you would still get the dopamine hit for seeing your hot take get a million likes.
While I doubt there's a lot more Twitter could be doing to combat bots, it would be great to see more transparency. I hope the government (either state legislatures, congress, or the FCC) is able to drive some progress there.
So is Uber, Dropbox, Amazon, Google, and many other companies. However Tesla's headquarters is in Texas, so for the purposes of the Texas AG, they're a Texas company.
> Twitter bots helped build the cult of Elon Musk and Tesla. But who’s creating them?
> on the evening of Nov. 7, within a span of 75 minutes, eight automated Twitter accounts came to life and began publishing positive sentiments about Tesla. Over the next seven years, they would post more than 30,000 such tweets.
> Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%.
>The researchers are looking at the timing of the tweets and options activity in the overnight stock market, among other factors. One big unknown: whether the bots are the work of entities with a direct financial interest in Tesla.
