The world’s richest man continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help Republican politicians escape the electoral consequences of their spectacular mismanagement of all three branches of the federal government. We’ll see if he can succeed in buying another election.
Whether it works again or not, Elon Musk has already gotten many obvious perks through his support of Republicans in general, and Donald Trump in particular. From ridiculous tax breaks to a fun stint operating as the shadow president while the head of DOGE, all this investment in right-wing politics has paid off tangibly for Musk, allowing him to do so many things he evidently wanted to do.
Yet, for all of his bravado, and all of his casual cruelty, I think Musk actually does want to be liked. I’m convinced he bought Twitter because he really did believe something nefarious was happening on the platform that was keeping him from getting the attention and positive affirmation he craved.
To those of us not insulated from reality by nearly three decades of obscene wealth, it might seem obvious that accumulating the largest personal fortune in the history of the world is not really a good way to win a popularity contest, to say nothing of cutting hundreds of thousands of people’s jobs, or causing the deaths of many thousands of poor people abroad who could have been saved for pennies. Rather than try to be more likable, however, Musk opted for delusion.
In control of his own social media platform, Musk could tweak and tinker with the algorithm to his heart’s content (or order his engineers to do it for him, anyhow) so as to maximize engagement with his own tweets. Fiddle with those dials enough, and even an unlikeable billionaire actively striving to make life worse for everyone poorer than him could build a huge following.
Or so it seemed. Before he purchased Twitter, Musk complained repeatedly about the number of bots and fake accounts infesting the platform. Once the deal closed, he got conveniently quiet about bots on the newly renamed “X” platform.
Over the last week, Ukrainian forces struck three of Russian tech behemoth Yandex’s five data centers in response to Moscow’s attacks on internet infrastructure in Ukraine. Suddenly, tens of thousands of Musk’s most fervent supporters on X fell silent.
After these strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations” online. His reasoning was simple: “fewer bots.”
It is exceedingly difficult to definitively prove how many of a person’s followers on social media are bots. That being said, throughout October, up until Ukraine took out these data centers that had been linked to Russian bot farms, Musk’s posts attracted an average of between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day. After the strikes, the average range of daily likes plummeted to 8,000 to 11,000.
Other than a big swath of Russian data centers being put out of commission, nothing else had apparently changed. Could perhaps as many as 90% of the “people” who had been liking Musk’s posts really have been Russian bots?
Russia had no qualms about waging massive campaigns to interfere in America’s elections. Vladimir Putin has time and again played Donald Trump like a fiddle to gain leverage in Russia’s ongoing war against not just Ukraine, but against the concept of freedom itself. It is entirely believable that Russia would ply an American tech oligarch who is obsessed with his level of engagement on social media by deploying a Twitter bot army.
None of this is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If you asked me to weigh the preponderance of the evidence, though, I’d say most of Musk’s supposed fans are in reality Russian bullshit. Ukraine should go ahead and destroy the other two Yandex data centers.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Up To 90% Of Elon Musk’s Fans May Have Been Russian Bots, And Ukraine Just Silenced Them appeared first on Above the Law.
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