Roughly 5 days ago, Elon Musk's offer to buy the majority of Twitter was announced as approved.
Its important to note, right now he doesn't own it & unless I'm mistaken he doesn't even sit on the board right now. They have eleven Directors on the Board & one is the CEO.
Any changes currently happening are not of Musk's doings or if they are the current board is failing in its duties. Until Musk's deal is finalised, the board's fiduciary duty is not owed to Elon Musk, its owed to all the shareholder's best interests.
So what changes have happened?
Turns out some things have changed.
Some self confessed members of the leff have announced they're leaving Twitter.
That's their choice but not a change to Twitter by Twitter.
Also to note, there are no self confessed members of the Left or Progressives or Liberals or "insert whatever name carried by non conservative types" have claimed they were cancelled by the right.
That aside what changes have happened. Well it's possible some people not of the Progressive/Left/Liberal side of things have seen their follower numbers increase over night.
Especially if you're a conservative commentator or a nobody like the rest of us who regulary made comments not supportive of Socialism, Cancel Culture and a number of other ideologies.
If you don't believe me, there's this YouTube video complete with factual stats.
Some leftist posters are seeing big drops in their numbers & conservative twatters are seeing big rises.
This can be caused by one of several things.
1) Someone of the right has taken control of Twitter to reduce the legitimate numbers of those following Left leaners & increase the fake followers of those on Twitter who lean right.
2) Someone's cleaning up what has been a historical reduction of real follower numbers of Right leaning people & reduced the fake followers of the left
3) Or all of a sudden millions of right leaning people joined Twitter & started following right leaning posters & maybe millions of Left leaning followers de-activated their accounts & in doing so, reduced the left followers en masse.
Now I don't know for sure. I'd guess, stress guess, that if I had to have a bet, someone is cleaning house, covering tracks hoping no one would notice.
Well people DID NOTICE and I hope Musk & whoever he decides to employ gets to have an accurate, forensic account of any "algorithem" or efforts to ghost people out, delete accounts or false out the projected follower numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4ymTJUiEcA&t=2s
Now what did I notice, I remember a thought & a conversation a week or two ago about follower numbers
It then led me to go see how many followers my peers had or people I differed from had. How many certain MPs had as well as famous celebrities around Australia & the world.
As it happens one person & their count compared to mine stuck in my head.
The unnamed person is a person I know of but never met. They from WA and I always considered them a bit of a closet lefty. Actually I don't know what an impressive count is for a Western Australian.
But she or he was about 1000 followers more than me.
As for number of posts per day...yeah I think its fair to say I post a bit too often.
In fact turns out its nearly an average of 16 posts a day. Whereas the he or she I'm comparing with sits nearly 40% lower.
Maybe that means something or completely nothing, maybe we post incredibly different things, move in different circles, I move in a lesser number of circles...in fact I'd guess all of the above.
But to be sensible I'll just say followers mean very little or if it does, I don't know what it is.
To be honest I recall my original account hitting 100 followers and I thought "WOW" because I never expected to get that high. It got quite high by "a nobody in Western Australia" standards. And yes then it got cancelled for reasons I never actually understood nor could find out. Well kinda. A large number complaints were made & it cited violent & harmful content. And it was incorrect & was on contiunal review for several months so I cancelled it and sometime later, just started a new account.
Its fair to say some of the many words I have used in the new account (8 or so years old) have included vegan activist, vegan iedology, socialism, marxism, post modernist Marxism, cancel culture, communism, transgender ideology and we critical or mocking of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, leader of N.Korea, quite a number of faults of WALabor MPs...and some other MPs etc etc.
So by pure chance I knew the rough number of my follower count. I thought, cool...if what the US Conservative commentators are saying is true, if some of them are seeing their follower count jump but massive numbers and spotting prominent Democrat figures in the USA drop by sizeable numbers than mine should have jump by maybe as much as a dozen, maybe nearly 2 dozen...if its just an algorithem someone has set to filter some stats up & other stats down.
However it was a bit of a jolt. In less than a few days, maybe 10 days tops my follower numbers have jumped up as well. My friend the closet lefty...same number. Mine...well I kid you not.
It is just a few followers short of exactly 90% increase.
In less than a week.
I don't care what Elon Musk does with the platform. I'll watch n see, see what its like & decide if I stay or go. I'll probably stay regardless unless it goes to an over priced subscription.
I small fee, yeah I probably would stay. If anonymous accounts are removed then yes I would stay. If an edit but is introduced I'd happily stay. If it stays free speech but with each poster being legally accountible for their comments...still all good for me.
In any case, it will be his firm, his business, his choice.
It will continue to provide a service & it's a consensual contract, no one is forced to join & use so all good.
I have spoken to others who's account has been pro Conservative and half of them are saying their follower number clocked up rapidly too.
And after all that, I found follower numbers are likely to not mean much when it turns out you can buy followers.
I went looking and yup, quickly found 5 online services where you can purchase 1000 followers for no more than US$30.00
Both "Real & Active"
So if I were selling a book or some art & starting out...yup you could simply drop US$2000 & pick up over 65,000 followers. Yes people would notice.
Or if you have a good Public Relations Strategy or team, drop $10,000 & rocket to well over 333,000 followers. I think sales could benefit or maybe they wouldn't. One thing for sure, its a distorted system creating a vague result.
Or...
Or I'm 100% wrong & I somehow legitimately picked up a 90% increase in followers in the last week. Interesting also is in the notifications. I had 3 notifications of new followers in the last few days.
No notifications of a 90% jump though...hmmm, let me think, something is fishy or I'm a genius in increasing follower numbers & I don't know it.
Hmmmm?
Sadly, I have to go with fishy.
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