Struck a deal with the Twitter board to purchase Twitter and make it private.
All of a sudden people are noticing some strange shifts in their follower counts.
Now let me just preface this by saying that all of the alarmist stuff that you
typically see on Twitter about like blacklisting people and
follower accounts like I usually roll my eyes at those stories because
it's who cares and it's usually a super dorky like argument.
But there are some significant shifts here that are alarming people and
while you might think that Elon Musk is behind it,
just want to warn you that the deal is going to take months to close.
He's not officially in charge of Twitter but
there is something going on, I'm not sure what it is.
Let me give you the details.
So it all started with people noticing that they're losing thousands
of followers while right wing accounts are actually gaining in some cases
hundreds of thousands of followers.
So it was like what is going on here?
The Twitter account by Caroline Orr Bueno explains in detail
what people have been noticing and she provides the receipts.
So the first tweet is this, I'm looking at follower accounts among influential right
wing and left wing Twitter accounts and it appears that Matt Gates has gained more
than 21,000 new followers since yesterday, far more than his daily average of 1300.
Now you can see the date there, she tweeted that on April 26.
So the numbers have changed since meaning he's actually grown his following
even more since then.
But let me give you more from the thread because I think that she illustrates
what's going on really, really well.
Ron DeSantis has gained more than 96,000 new followers since yesterday,
nearly 18 times his daily average of 5,406 new followers.
Okay, let's pause for a second.
There are 96,000 people in the country that are like who in a single
day thinking like Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida really want to like
96,000 in one day, like, I don't know, I'm not buying it.
Like either of these are fake accounts, there's something weird going on, but
let me give you more.
Lauren BoeBert has gained more than 43,000 followers since yesterday that's more
than 16 times her daily average of 2600 followers.
I don't even believe that she has 2,600 organic real people followers a day
either, but really, 43,000 followers in a single day, new followers in a single day.
Okay, Donald Trump Jr has gained more than 87,000 followers since yesterday.
That's nearly 20 times his daily average of 4500.
TrumpWarRoom has gained nearly 20,000 new followers since yesterday
that's more than 20 times its daily average of 968 new followers.
I really appreciate that she shows the daily average, so
you can kind of understand how insane this is.
Now Twitter did respond to questions about what's going on and
we'll give you their answer in just a minute.
But before we do,
why don't we compare it to what's happening to prominent left wing accounts?
Let's take a look at the left side of Twitter now, starting with Rachel Maddow
who has lost more than 18,000 followers since yesterday,
that's compared to her daily average of 223 new followers.
AOC has lost more than 11,000 followers since
yesterday that's compared to her daily average of 468.
And then you have Kamala Harris who lost more than 16,000 followers since
yesterday, that's compared to her daily average of adding 5,124 new followers.
And I also want to just quickly remind you guys or tell you guys you might
not know Obama in a single day, lost 300,000 followers.
So there's a clear difference between right wing accounts versus left wing
accounts.
I think it might be a coincidence it's likely a coincidence that this all
happened as soon as Elon musk was announced to be the new soon to be new
owner of Twitter.
And the reason why I say that is because again like the deal is gonna,
it takes months to close.
It's not like all right, we struck a deal and then like literally immediately
after that he's in charge of everything it doesn't work out that way.
Now there's something awry like something is going on.
I don't know what it is, I'm not gonna lie and tell you that I know what it is,
I don't know what it is, but these are the facts, this is what we're noticing.
One thing that I do know for
sure is that the excuse that Twitter gave makes no sense and I'll tell you why.
So Twitter did release a statement while we continue to take action on accounts
that violate our spam policy.
No you don't.
Which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to
largely be the result of an increase in new account creation and
deactivation Twitter said in a statement.
So they argue that all of this is organic that in a single day 300,000
people who follow Obama were so disturbed about Elon musk owning
the company that they all deactivated their accounts in a single day.
I just don't buy it, I don't believe it.
And allegedly in a single day you have all these
prominent right wingers increasing their count significantly.
Because all like all of a sudden all these people decided
to create Twitter accounts to follow people like Ron DeSantis,
I just I don't believe it, I just don't believe it.
Okay but the reason why I'm bringing this all up is to say who cares,
who cares Elon musk buying Twitter yeah it sucks,
it sucks mostly because he's clearly not an advocate of free speech.
He's an advocate of speech he likes, he's an advocate of speech
that he's neutral toward as we provided evidence yesterday.
He is not an advocate of any speech that might hurt his bottom line at Tesla,.
He has gone after reporters, journalists, bloggers,
anyone who has been critical of Tesla when there were reports on Chinese
social media indicating that Tesla was producing cars with faulty brakes.
He hit up the Chinese government to try to get them to censor those reports on
social media platforms.
So look, it's that you don't even have to think he's a bad guy.
Okay, take good guy, bad guy out of the equation completely.
Just think about everything in terms of incentives and disincentives people,
human nature, the things that motivate humans are incentives and
disincentives, we know this.
And for Elon Musk, yeah, he loves speech as long as it's not hurting
him because his incentive is to maximize profit for his businesses.
So I don't believe the free speech argument at all like I said yesterday and
I'll repeat it again if you genuinely see Twitter as the public
square a place where free speech absolutely must be protected.
The only way to ensure that the First Amendment to our constitution
applies to it.
The only way to ensure that the courts would actually intervene
to protect your speech is to make Twitter a public utility,
not to privatize it further with allowing one incredibly wealthy person to
have complete control over it or most of the control over it.
That just, it just doesn't make any sense.
You have no actual protections at the end of the day,
it's a private company that can do whatever it wants, it could ban you,
it could block you, it could take your tweets down.
and you have no recourse you have no way of fighting against that
because it's a private company, it is not protected or
your speech on that platform is not protected by our constitutional right.
But no one is having a discussion about making it a public utility.
Anyway, putting that aside, the reason why I say it doesn't really
matter is because Twitter is not representative of the American population.
We know this, we've talked about this before.
In fact the majority of Americans are not even active on Twitter in the first place.
So while it seems like this is an apocalyptic update,
it's the end of the world.
We also have to be aware that we live in a little bit of a bubble,
especially people who work in the industry I work in, okay,
what happens when I don't go on Twitter for a month.
Nothing, my life is great in fact my life is better.
And what I find myself doing instead of wasting time on Twitter fighting with
randoes is I have conversations with people in my community which
is what the left should be focusing on.
And to be sure there are members of the left who are focusing on that have been
focusing on that and have been organizing their work places, they've been canvassing
for the local candidates, they want to endorse and support.
They've been putting in work and I'm talking about real groundwork and
maybe this is a good opportunity for the left to step back and
try to figure out what their real priorities are.
Is your priority to remain atomized, sitting behind a computer screen
all day fighting with random people who might even be bots on Twitter.
Or should your priority be figuring out ways to get in touch with members of
your community, members of your workplace, colleagues, coworkers.
And figure out how you can organize, figure out how you can strategize and
actually implement policies, strategies that accumulate real power.
So let's get into a little bit of the demos here when it comes to Twitter.
Hopefully this gives you guys a little bit of hope because I don't think this is
the end of the world, Twitter sucked to begin with.
It might suck a little more, but who cares, you can get around that by finding
other ways to communicate with people face to face, which is far more effective.
So, who uses Twitter In February of 2021, it was found
that 42% of adults in the United States Aged between 18 and 29 used Twitter.
So when it comes to young people, we don't even have 50% of them on Twitter,
most people are not on Twitter.
Okay, let me give you more.
This age group was the microblogging service's
biggest audience in the United states,
followed by a 27% usage reach among 30- 49 year olds.
It ain't the end of the world.
Look, it could Twitter be used as a positive tool for organizing maybe.
Yeah, it might help to get your message out there, but again,
I don't think it's the end of the world because a lot of people are not on
Twitter in the first place.
According to Pew Research in November of 2021, 25% of us adult
Twitter users are responsible for 97% of posts in the country.
And by the way we had shared some interesting statistics recently from
an Atlantic Piece that I think is relevant to what I'm trying to say here.
Where they write that the furthest to the right known as the devoted conservatives
comprised 6% of the us population.
The group furthest to the Left.
The progressive activist comprised 8% of the population.
The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media,
70% had shared political content over the previous year.
The devoted conservatives followed at 56%.
I give you that because when you look at social media, I think a lot of people
are misled into thinking, no, this really is the public square.
This is where everyone comes to engage in political discourse, this is it,
this is all we've got.
But when you look at the demographics and the percentage of Americans who are active
on Twitter, you get a completely different story.
So all is not lost.
In fact, we could use this as a positive thing,
we could use this as an opportunity to again,
really recalibrate our approach, rethink what our priorities are.
Stop wasting time fighting random people on social media and
figure out ways to really connect with people.
Find that time to actually organize,
because that is the only thing that I've seen pay dividends in this country so far.
All of these workplaces that have organized all of these strikes that have
happened to improve working conditions to ensure that they get better pay.
That's where I see hope in the country.
But if we're gonna rely on these private owned, corporate backed social
media platforms to change the world, we've got another thing coming.
I mean, Twitter was insanely manipulated to begin with,
it probably will be even worse moving forward.
But again, it doesn't really matter if you find fruitful strategies to get what you
want out of your community, out of your politicians, certainly local politicians.
So it's a little bit of a hopeful message, I think we can win and
we can use this as a way to kind of fuel a different strategy that I think
is just gonna be far more effective.