Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?


Remember when Musk’s entire cause celebre was to expose the bot networks and paid trolls on Twitter and then he dropped all of that bluster when he realized how useful they’d be to his political goals?


This also was an individual who was getting very little sleep, taking an unknown assortment of hallucinogenic psychotropics, who clearly got drunk off his own success and the attention he got, possibly psyop'd by multiple governments due to his reach and influence.

It's kind of tragic. He reminds me of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings. People lacking any virtue (like wisdom, compassion, or courage) are extremely vulnerable to external dark forces.


Then why is he allowing it to be exposed right now? If actually useful to his political goals, he would suppress the launch of the location feature, right?


If your bot farm happens to be domestic, exposing all the foreign bot-farms competing for the same audience seems like a no brainer.


Haven't they turned the feature off again already? (I don't have a twitter account, so I can't check)


It was useful to his political goals back in 2023/2024 when he was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected - it seems like he doesn’t think they’re still useful today.


They’re probably also such a large part of the active Twitter “user base” that substantially reigning them in would be enough to put the product into a permanent, sharp decline.


While I don't agree with him doing that, he's doing it above board and in his own name. That's different from foreign actors doing it incognito under covered identities.

Elon is a nut, but he's open about being a nut.


That would require introspection, something he's far too busy for.


> How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?

Musk has his own agenda.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: