Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter and then back out of the deal has led to a hectic legal battle between the two parties that can, at times, seem detached from people’s everyday lives.
You’re forgiven if you haven’t been moved in any way by this clash between multibillion-dollar entities. But you should be.
To give you a sense of where things stand, Musk is trying to renege on his accepted offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, arguing the company misled him about the number of inauthentic accounts (or bots) on the platform. Twitter is hoping a court will mandate that the deal go through as agreed upon.
In a since-deleted tweet, Musk on Saturday took aim at Twitter over the bots, according to The Associated Press.
“If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,” Musk reportedly wrote. “However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.”
And here’s the thing: Though this could be a ploy by Musk to drive down Twitter’s price, or back out of a deal he never intended to close, we all should want to know exactly how many fake accounts there are on Twitter.
Virtually anyone with a public-facing profile, and particularly a verified one, can attest to the abundance of inauthentic accounts on the platform.
Color me skeptical, but I personally find it hard to believe that a Twitter user with a handle like @MAGAMANJohn1849203927393, whose account was created just this month, is a real person. But accounts just like this are all over Twitter, and they occasionally interact and argue with one another.
We can’t afford to downplay what it means for a platform so many of us occupy for hours a day to be populated by so many “fake” accounts, pushing narratives to persuade us and even anger us at times. Now is a ripe time for social media skepticism, which is why — independent of Musk’s bot crusade — there should be a public demand for this information, as well.
Revelations about the manipulative influence of social media, brought to the fore by people like Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, expose the massive sway these platforms have over us. The public deserves to know how much of that is due to organic discussions between humans, and how much is a contrivance by fake accounts meant to nudge us one way or the other.
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Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.