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When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, one of the sticking points on the price tag was the question regarding the percentage of Twitter accounts that were bots. Prior ownership claimed that it was only five percent at most. Musk and others argued that it was likely much higher, maybe 50 percent or more. 

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The sale went through, of course, and judging by the bot purges that Musk and his new team have performed over the past two years, he was probably a lot closer to the mark than what Twitter’s previous management stated. It also means that Musk FAR overpaid for Twitter at $44 billion. But in his own words, it was worth it to create a free speech platform for people that wasn’t nearly as controlled or manipulated as other social media sites. 

Mark Zuckerberg, it appears, has decided to go in the opposite direction and embrace the bot swarm. 

Recently, Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has confirmed that they will not eliminate but actually be adding A.I.-generated users and accounts on those two platforms.  

Well, now. Isn’t that just a nightmare scenario right out of the most recent Mission: Impossible movie? (Or WarGames if you are old like this writer.)

Here is some more from The Financial Times. 

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Notice how the last line in the sentence above reads ‘should,’ not ‘must.’ 

There’s a reason for that. 

Not even the ‘young people’ that Meta claims it is trying to reach. We all may love AI as a tool, but we don’t want it impersonating humans, especially secretively.

Based on download statistics, Twitter (now X) is destroying Meta’s social media platforms in terms of growth. But we’re not sure how adding fake users and alienating real people will fix that. 

Technically, it would only be fraud if Meta included AI-generated accounts in its user data. But again, that brings us back to that sentence above that uses the word ‘should’ and not the word ‘must.’

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Yes, if they did that, it would be fraud. 

For those not familiar, the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ claims that AI already controls social media and most of the internet. 

Currently, it is labeled a ‘conspiracy theory,’ which means we need to give it about six months before finding out that it might be true. 

HA. 

We’ve been on Facebook recently. This isn’t far off. 

It’s also potentially very dangerous. 

We don’t want to go too far off the rails here, but there have been documented cases of AI encouraging people to commit suicide. In Texas, a chatbot even encouraged one teen to kill his parents. 

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We’ll just leave you with that ‘Yikes.’

In truth, this strategy by Meta is more indicative of the fact that its platforms are becoming more irrelevant every day. 

Whether they admit it or not, it’s true. But we don’t think this move will change anything for them. 

They’re not going the way of MySpace anytime soon, but it is clear that Twitter is on the rise and Meta is on the decline. 

Musk has gotten himself into hot water with Twitter users recently with some of the new aspects of the Twitter algorithm. But it is clear that he values human contributions and interactions far more than the AI tools that Twitter does employ. 

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We are not Luddites here at Twitchy. We embrace new technology and that includes artificial intelligence. Even if we wanted to stop AI, that’s like trying to hold back the tide with a rake. (Just wait’ll you find out how much the Defense Department, the national supply chain, and other huge government agencies already rely on AI.) 

But we’re also (mostly) Gen X here, so we’re highly suspicious of it. 

And we’ve seen the movie Ex Machina. We know how this could end. 

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that and all this move by Meta does is signal the end of Facebook and Instagram.