Hey Elon, I see what you did there
I think it was about 6 months ago that Twitter–I mean X–announced it would discontinue to display a user's history of liked posts. There are a few good privacy related reasons to do this and I thought they provided a pretty good explanation for the decision.
But then I noticed the "hot babe profile bot" had been upgraded to 2.0
I remember the first time it happened, maybe five or ten years ago, and I can't remember if it happened on facebook or twitter but one day a really attractive woman either liked a post or followed or friended me and it only took a split second for the suspension of disbelief to wear off and for me to discover that it was clearly a bot account.
Since then on Twitter it's been mostly the same, busty women following my account, and I can see by their profiles that they have been able to get more than a few follow backs. Guys, guys, guys...
Their purpose was fairly obvious... on FB they were honey pots to entice you to give them permission to access your accounts, on Twitter they tracked your content.
It got so bad that I started blocking all the bot follower accounts so I could get a more accurate count of my real followers. And I discovered a new tool, the "remove follower" button.
But then around the time that X changed its like history policy, the bot got an upgrade. Now the bot accounts will like my posts and replies. They are all similar, with zero followers, zero following, and zero posts. I assume they exist to like posts, but X officially eliminated that feature as a policy.
And now I think I see what he did. He's using the likes to throw a tracker onto certain content. My suspicion is each of the bots are very specific in what they like.
The bot 2.0 already knows who you are, probably to an embarrassing degree. It doesn't need to slink in your back door. Private sector Big Brother is already so far up our butts. Now it's tracking the growth of ideas.
P.S. oh and as an addendum, TWICE now they have deleted my posts that say every assassin is a military flunkie with a copy of Catcher in his pocket, so I'm gonna keep repeating that cause it clearly bothers someone.
Comments
Interesting question:
Of the near infinity of ways to manipulate social media, what is going on now?
Chez moi -- I don't participate on platforms like X.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Hypothesis
I think they are building algorithms for preemptive censorship. The two vectors they seem to have been working on are 1) profiling and 2) narrative control. If you put them together you get preemptive censorship. Imagine in "Janice" likes every post that is pro-palestine. That gives Twitter a defined data set, and they can shadow ban every one of those accounts with the press of a button. Big Data people will recognize the efficiency of adding foreign keys to data as it's entered versus performing whole-set searches.
“He may not have gotten the words out but the thoughts were great.”
And here I thought I was a twitter stud.
I have been on twitter maybe 10 months or so. I use it to follow certain people. However, have a strict personal policy of never posting or responding to anything on twitter. I once looked at my followers and lo and behold, nothing but attractive women. Not bad for an old dude. But now I know why.
My situation is somewhat similar to yours.
I have been a member for longer than you. I use is solely to follow individuals to gather information that you will not find in the MSM. I have yet to comment and have even stopped liking comments that I agree with. As a result I have for the most part have 0 followers even though I occasionally get a few that I disregard and they eventually disappear.
post moved
I have 2 options on twitter
.
Read who I follow or read who twit thinks I’m interested in.
I clicked on my follows and there are tons of people I never did or would follow. Mostly republicans and people I’ve never heard of. The twit signed me up to follow those people. It’s a gigantic joke. I haven’t read the site for a week just because I’m tired of seeing all the deaths and burned houses. Sometimes it’s just too depressing.
Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.