The BBC reports that "staff cuts" are responsible for pro-Russian and pro-China trolls and bots running "unchecked" on Twitter. It strikes me that this editorializes a cause that may have more to do with policy than capacity.
In a BBC interview on Tuesday, Musk claimed there was "less misinformation [on Twitter] rather than more" under his tenure. He did not comment on active state troll farms on the platform nor the team that used to fight them.
We approached Twitter for comment but received no response other than a poo emoji – the standard auto-reply from the company to any press enquiry.
Was anyone surprised at how unprepared and inept that BBC interview was? It was a big win for Elon. There's a moment where Musk challenges the interviewer to describe what hate speech on Twitter is and the guy simply can't do it. A lot's been said about it–mostly gloating by the right wing–and I wonder if it speaks to the basic inability of media such as the BBC to field anyone but middle class twits who think they know about this stuff but have no experience of it, no empathy for it, no personal involvement or connection to it at all. Creatures of the floating world.
