And, of course, gay. Karl Denninger contemplates the possibility that social media is a mirage:
Twitter claims that “less than 5% of the users on their system are bots/spam/fake.” Ok, that’s testable. It’s also very material to the value of the company. Indeed its the entire reason someone buys advertising on these sites and thus forms the basis of the entire firm’s value; if the entire site is full of bots and not people then the value of said “advertising” and thus the company’s value is zero.
So Musk asked (in public, natch) for the evidence that the “less than 5% bot” claim was true.
Twitter’s CEO refused to provide said evidence, claiming that it would require disclosing “non-public” information.
Well, once you have an agreement to acquire something you get to look. It’s no different than a house; if you think there might be something wrong with the foundation you can have it inspected. Your purchase contract allows you to perform diligence to your satisfaction and further, if the seller is aware of a material falsehood that is part of the representations made he’s required to disclose it.
As someone who has sold a company anything you represent as true is certainly fair game for the buyer to ask to see in evidence and that absolutely includes anything you publicly claimed to be true under penalty of perjury in a 10Q or 10K.
The argument that its “non-public” information that is used to prove this is crap; the entire purpose of the NDA that you sign when you enter into such a transaction and perform your diligence is that you get to look under the Kimono to your satisfaction.
So…. what’s really going on here?
Never mind this report — that basically half of Biden’s “follows” are fake. Worse, 70% of Musk’s are too according to that article.
Would you mind explaining to me how “less than 5% of the accounts are bots” when half of the President of the United States’ accounts and 70% of Elon Musk’s are, by audit, fake?
More to the point: What percentage of “people” (“Daily Average Users” and “Monthly Average Users”) allegedly on these social media sites are actually….. people?
Is there any actual value in these “social media” firms at all or are they all ENRON on steroids?
I know it’s all fraudulent, because I’ve been able to see the difference between a) a blog post, b) a Twitter tweet with 33k followers, c) a Facebook post, d) a Gab post with 30k followers, and e) a Darkstream comment for years. The only two that ever moves the needle much were (a) and (e), with a distinct advantage to (a).
Mike Cernovich told me, several years ago, that he had reached similar conclusions, and his Twitter following dwarfed mine.