One of the things that seems to have emerged as part of the background to Elon Musk purchasing Twitter is that various people are starting to pay attention to various socially destructive groups and individuals who give, by way of their large following on Twitter, the impression that their views are widely supported. Pink News for example has over a quarter of a million Twitter followers which is the sort of follower level that would suggest that this media outlet has a lot of support.
However when Graham Linehan dug into some of the high profile posts on Twitter by Pink News, which has been a major promoter of the Cult of Trans in the UK, he found that these posts had a remarkably low level of engagement. Even stories put up by Pink News that had had a lot of coverage outside of the gay press ghetto seem to have had very little engagement when it came to the Twitter account of Pink News. There were very few likes, re-tweets, quote-Tweets or comments on these pieces. This is not what could be expected from an account with 250,000 followers. You should be able to expect that with such a large baseline of followers.
When you compare the lack of engagement that the followers of Pink News has with someone like Douglas Murray, who gets hundreds of comments, re-tweets and likes from 0.5 million followers, then it makes one wonder just why engagement on the Pink News Twitter account is so low. Are these followers as Mr Linehan suggest some form of spectral apparition such as ghosts, or is it a situation, as I believe, that the bulk of the followers of Pink News are bots or other form of non-human accounts? The lack of engagement on the Pink News Twitter feed is, as Mr Linehan says, absolutely ‘extraordinary’.
I’m not wholly surprised by this. I suspect that there are various “activist” NGOs and players such as Soros who set up these auto-Bot accounts. This is precisely what Elon Musk was alluding to but got short shrift from the execs he has gotten rid of. I suspect that when the algorithms and corrections are done, several million fake accounts will disappear, you know the ones, 0 followers 0 tweets, I’m constantly blocking them.
It doesn’t even need to be a high profile funder of left leaning causes such as Soros to create this sort of situation. It also doesn’t need to be a top down thing either. The creation and exploitation of bot accounts on social media by leftist NGO’s might be a more spread out thing with individual NGO’s and their supporters creating bot armies that then follow other similar lefty NGO’s as well as the ones that the bot army was originally created for. This creates a Potemkin village which gives the appearance that a group or a cause is popular when it really is not. One case where I believe this has happened is the ‘refugees welcome’ one. It’s by no means a popular cause with the man on the Clapham Omnibus but it looks on line as if it is wildly popular.
I’m still on Twitter as @yabouhti, my other one got zapped for “misinformation” that was official information. Lost thousands of followers. I also have a spoof account @HMS_Neasden that I post to occasionally. Welsh-Harp Navel HQ.
Thanks for that info.