Everyone’s waiting for the outcome of whether or not Elon Musk will eventually own Twitter. He’s purportedly walking away from the deal, claiming that Twitter users are primarily bots, and the company isn’t offering any hard evidence to prove otherwise. In fact, as TruthTent reported, “Twitter’s bot check sample size was only 100 users, Musk reveals.”

Then again, he didn’t do his due diligence before making the offer…

The stock price is way down, which employees are blaming on Musk, even though the market is way down in general, but if ‘users’ are primarily AI-generated bots, well, that does affect whether or not advertisers and marketers will pay a premium to the platform, so it may well be Musk’s fault for pointing that out, and further depressing the stock price.

Oops.

Which is far from Twitter’s only problem

As Elon Musk Walks, Twitter Workers Say No One’s in Charge, Wired reported.

But hasn’t that been the case for quite some time? Twitter hasn’t grown its user base in years. In fact, it has contracted, considering all the deplatforming in which the company has engaged over the last few years. As Shelly Palmer noted, “All successful social media businesses have one thing in common: they are constantly growing their user bases…In a world that is becoming more and more connected every day, Twitter has done the unthinkable: it has shrunk.”

What to speak of the fact that Twitter has long been an entity in search of an identity. It’s not a news outlet, per se. Does it have or has it ever really had a compelling consumer proposition? Musk’s objective in acquiring Twitter was to own a media company, like his buddies. Which Twitter could have been, the drop in stock price/sticker price aside, so what’s not being said in all the ‘he said/she said,’ Musk/Twitter reportage that has flooded the zeitgeist of late?

Of course, the dirty little secret is what the Age of Social is really all about – or at least has devolved into. Not about bringing the world closer and making it more connected, obviously, given not only the Twitter bot count but also the deplatforming/censorship/shadowbanning/manipulations that we’ve seen on all of the major socials, including Twitter, Google and Facebook, which has not only included incendiary posts, and fine, but also posts from doctors and even elected officials.

The Age of Social has gone well beyond surveillance capitalism at this juncture.

It’s all about social engineering.

Why else would Twitter have given no consideration to user growth and eliminating bots? And you know us well enough to know that we don’t have to spell out who is doing the engineering/pulling the strings. It may be that Musk discovered that he wasn’t acquiring quite the media outlet he had had in mind and there’s more going on here than the price tag.

Is Twitter overvalued, at this point? Depends on your endgame.

“If Musk can prove that Twitter is mostly fake, he will likely be able to purchase the company for a much cheaper price than his initial bid. But most importantly, the revelations that come out of this fiasco has exposed Twitter for the fraud that it has long been,” said TruthTank.

 

A fraud, or worse. Which may well make Twitter something that Musk hadn’t quite bargained for. Onward and forward.