This is another story inspired by a Twitter Spaces discussion I listened to, Elon Musk was the topic of the discussion, or rather the Twitter poll he set up asking if he should step down as Twitter CEO. The results are in and the poll indicates that the people want Musk to step down and see how CNN and Bloomberg are reporting on the poll.
And the official results from 17,502,391 votes, 57.5% voted yes and 42.5% voted no so the people have spoken. Or have they? It’s impossible to tell because the nature of Twitter polls does not allow us to see who voted or how. Elon Musk has 122.2 million followers so you can’t see any obvious shenanigans going on and only Elon Musk can see the analytics. But perhaps he should take a good hard look at them.
During the conversation, it came up that it is very easy to bot the polls. In other words, bots can vote for you and do so at a higher rate than you could. So I tested this and it was indeed very easy. I set up a Twitter poll on the Disgruntlednews.com Twitter page asking a nonsensical question: Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?
Just as the title of this article indicates, I totally cheated. There were a total of 150 votes all voting yes and I paid for all of them using two different websites here and here. Total cost $2.28. Now have a look at the analytics.
As of this posting, there were eight impressions, five engagements, and five detail expands. I ran this poll for one hour only and 100% of the 150 votes were paid for. On top of all that, I have only 7 followers and I am not a Twitter Blue subscriber. So there is no possible way that my Twitter Poll had any significant reach on Twitter. Here’s a screenshot of my profile as of this posting.
I can not say with any level of certainty that Elon Musk’s Twitter poll results were rigged by bots, but I can say that it is possible and probably quite likely. To be clear here, this is not some desperate attempt to get Elon Musk to change his mind or to expose some conspiracy. I can’t be certain that Elon Musk even knows I exist much less even view my blog which has been in existence for less than a week. I simply set out to prove how easy it is to influence the results of Twitter polls. Not only that, I could artificially build my profile and gain more followers, but why be fake?
I’ve listened to you in Twitter spaces and was impressed by your honesty. You have a new fan. If you ever need help with research, etc, I’d be glad to lend a hand.