Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
So Elon has a pretend plan to solve the problem he pretend wants to fix on his pretend serious communication platform Twitter: He’s going to charge people a nominal fee of $1/year to post. This, he claims, will tie accounts to people via their CC info and make it harder to be a bot on Twitter.
This is idiotic for a number of reasons: first, people are neither tied to a real name on Twitter, nor restricted from having more than one Twitter account. Second, as the link shared above clearly shows, PLENTY of bots already exist that are blue checks, which as you might remember, is $8/month.
The reality is people like Elon NEED bots on Twitter, because without bots on twitter, people like Elon wouldn’t have followers or retweets. Now, you might be thinking that even if this $1/yr thing doesn’t eliminate the bot problem, it’ll help, right? And the answer is actually, “probably.”
But the problem is not going to be ‘fixed’ without Data Analytics and heuristics being built into the platform to mute and/or suspend these accounts- steps that Elon has resisted based on his farcical definition/understanding of the concept of free speech. Stopping bot behavior would go a long way towards quieting the disinformation campaigns coming from the lunatic fringe, and we all know Elon can’t stomach THAT idea.