I went looking for more official metrics, but Twitter doesn't really share daily site visitorship

I feel like the article does a good enough job to sow doubt in the headline.

To be fair, Musk probably didn't know he was interacting with bots. His ego is probably taking a nose dive as well.

“Woah, Elon Musk out here getting less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded,” YouTuber Zack “Jerry Rig Everything” Nelson tweeted. A screenshot appended to the post shows Musk receiving 4,900 likes after responding “Wow” to a racist conspiracy theory that claims Brussels, Belgium, is “only 10.5 percent white.”

And now suddenly Starlink became restricted for the Ukrainian army. I wish I was joking.

Arendt explains that totaliarianist wet dreams is to build up an humanity of robots. The techbros have the same kind of dreams, bot or people, I guess it doesn't change much for a guy like Musk. I believe that's why they are so enthusiastically professing that we are all going to be replaced by AI. It is the other way around, to build some humanitized robots to replace the human who are reluctant to be robotized.

I have yet to see anyone provide concrete stats on any of this, mostly just gut feelings and vibes.

Conversely, we know that the "bots" on Yandex were indexing websites. Like how Google indexes websites.

Perhaps there were some things in the Yandex cloud, but there weren't many, at most, because all I've heard has been vague rumour. Except for services in Russia going down, which is widely reported, and indexing by Yandex bots disappearing, which is also widely reported.

So far, all of these articles seem to be trading on rumour and feelings, and I don't like that in my journalism.

I couldn't find this hannah arendt text about robots, any chance you can share this 🙏 ?

https://dashboards.cluvio.com/dashboards/qxny-9e5q-k65v/shared you can see the engagement drop here

Not for nothing but Brussels is white as mayo on fries

"Missing authentication token"

Saame

He absolutely knows about the bots. He's complicit in using them to make the rightwing viewpoint look bigger than it is. MAGA is a farce. Elections have been compromised since 2016.

I'll check. I read it in the French version of Totalitarianism. I have an ebook of the english version somewhere.

In the french version the term "robot" is used when she argues that totalitarian people are not like religious fanatics. At war, they are not sacrifying themselves. They are not dying as martyrs but as robots.

At the end of Chapter 11 - I: Totalitarian Propaganda
The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an ‘Aryan’ physiognomy (Himmler used to select the applicants for the SS from photographs) and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence of the world.
The advantages of a propaganda that constantly ‘adds the power of organization’fn58 to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.
It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots).fn59 Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.
The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism as an ideology had been so fully ‘realized’ that its content ceased to exist as an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak; destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all the fanaticism of believers.