Texas Suddenly Cares About Bots on Twitter
Paxton and his team are headline hounds, often looking for what is making the rounds in the news sphere before announcing a big “investigation” or lawsuit against whomever gets them the most brownie points in ever-fluctuating conservative circles.
So when newfound Texas darling Elon Musk who brought his companies like SpaceX and Tesla into the lone star state starts making waves over concerns about bots on Twitter, you know Paxton was paying eagle-eyed attention. Before the Texas transplant went ahead and tried to blow up his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, the Texas attorney general said he was investigating whether Twitter wasn’t telling the truth about its bots.
Paxton claimed the number of bots on Twitter affects state residents because not only do Texans rely on Twitter, but also does “Texas businesses and advertisers who use Twitter for their livelihoods.”
There’s been so much talk about bots since then. The ongoing lawsuit between Twitter and Musk depends heavily on Musk’s claim Twitter wasn’t being transparent about how many users were bots. A former Twitter exec claims in a whistleblower report that the bot situation is more severe than the company alleges, mostly due to the limited ways Twitter identifies who’s a bot and who’s not. Then again, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that when his company planned to buy Twitter, they found “a substantial portion, not a majority, were not real.”
But whether Paxton’s office has the technical capability to identify all the moving parts of the debate is another matter.
