Speaker 1: One of the sort of side stories with what's going on on Twitter with this
reportedly accepted offer for Elon Musk to purchase Twitter and to take it private.
One of the side stories that's come up and many of you have emailed me about it, many
of you have noticed how it has affected my Twitter account is the significant number
of followers that many left leaning accounts have lost on Twitter.
And so I'm going to explain this story as I currently know it, and I'm going to try
to be as accurate and precise as possible without going beyond what we know and what's
been said, because it is still sort of a developing story.
So the way that this started is right around Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, when we learned about
this effort that has reportedly been accepted by Twitter, although it's not yet been approved.
It's been accepted in principle, but it's not hasn't happened and it still may not.
For Elon Musk to buy Twitter, we started seeing overwhelming anecdotal reports of high profile
Twitter accounts and verified Twitter accounts reporting losing huge numbers of followers
right in that period of time where it started to become known that Elon Musk may be buying
Twitter.
And initially the assumption was before Twitter put out any statement, you saw a lot of venture
capital and investment type people saying what's happening here is Twitter is cleaning
up the bots and the fake accounts for the sale.
Because part of what you need to this was the story they were telling.
There was no evidence for this.
But they were saying, you know, when you're going to true, part of the valuation is based
on the number of users.
And so you want to feel really good that you can give an accurate number of real people
that are using the service.
So you want to eliminate bots and fake accounts.
And it may be that the more followers you have, the more fake followers that you have.
It never struck me as accurate.
I don't think that just an agreement in principle would immediately start some kind of algorithmic
closure of accounts believed to be fake or bots.
So it just wasn't logical.
It's possible that would be done, but the idea that it would start instantly upon the
news breaking of Elon Musk's purchase, it just didn't really make any sense.
But the numbers were pretty stunning.
A former president, Barack Obama, who's one of the most followed people on Twitter, maybe
the most followed.
He lost more than 300,000 followers after the announcement on Monday.
My verified account, my tiny little teeny weeny verified account, lost about a thousand
followers in that Monday, Tuesday period between Sunday and Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi lost like
13,000 followers.
Elizabeth Warren lost 14,000 followers.
Bernie Sanders lost 19,000 followers.
But then it appeared that not everybody was actually losing followers because some right
wing accounts were seeing massive dumps of new followers come in.
Marjorie Taylor GREENE, the radical Trumpist congresswoman personally.
She's banned on Twitter, but her congressional account is still active.
I know.
Whatever.
That's not even the whether that makes sense or not.
It's not the issue.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's account saw a record new 100,000 followers over that two day period.
I you know, I lost a thousand.
She gained 100,000.
So that can't be because of purging bots, because some people were gaining followers
and they seemed to be mostly right wingers.
Well, Twitter has now spoken out about it.
Twitter says that the follower changes that have been observed are coming from, quote,
natural account terminations.
A spokesperson at Twitter who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the more high
profile the account, the more of a fluctuation we've seen.
But these are not bot closures.
This is just people closing accounts and people signing up.
So the current claim from Twitter is I lost a thousand followers because a thousand of
my followers were genuinely mad that Elon Musk is buying Twitter.
And so they went and they closed their Twitter accounts.
And at the same time, Marjorie Taylor GREENE gained 100,000 followers because I guess right
wingers presumably happy that Elon Musk is buying Twitter, said, I'm going to make a
Twitter account or I'm going to take my dormant Twitter account and start following people
like Marjorie Taylor GREENE because I'm ready for the free speech and all of the different
things that Elon Musk is going to bring.
Ted Cruz gained more than 50,000 followers.
Matt Gates gained about 25,000 followers.
Right wing nut Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro gained close to 100,000 followers.
So do we believe this?
Do we believe this?
I mean, if it it can't be that this was a bot purge because the right wing accounts
are gaining followers.
If the belief is.
These are the.
Natural reactions.
Leftists are mad about Elon Musk, so they're closing accounts and right wingers are thrilled
about Elon Musk buying it.
So they're signing up.
If that's the case, it's a concern because of what it signals that Twitter may become.
The other part of it is I mean, listen, it's striking me as a little bit of a statistical
improbability that you would see such partizan changes to fall over so quickly.
It's just kind of weird.
We work with algorithms all the time.
And Jenny Yuga tweeted something similar.
We see how these things have happened over long periods of times on time, on YouTube,
and on different platforms.
I just don't know that I buy it.
I don't know.
I'm not accusing anyone in particular of lying.
Maybe it's a combination of things.
And of course, if the explanation that Twitter is giving is a lie, well, it's a concern that
Twitter is lying.
So to me, this is a red flag either way.
My personal behavior on Twitter is I continue to mute every annoying account because Twitter
has always been filled with lots of right wing trolls.
I actually looked at my account the other day.
What it would look like without thousands of trolls muted, it would be completely unusable.
And what's really funny is there are people who have been tweeting trash to me on Twitter
for years.
They've had no idea that I can't see their tweets and for years that it made me laugh
a little bit, that there's so many of them.
But as far as what we know now.
Twitter saying the fluctuations, left wingers losing followers, right wingers gaining followers.
This is a reflection of natural account creation and deletion, which, if true, raises real
questions about what the future of Twitter looks like under Elon Musk.
On today's bonus show, we're going to examine Elon Musk's history of speech as a defender
or not of free speech, which has been very much at issue here.
That'll be on today's bonus show.
I