MIT Review’s Chris Stokel-Walker cites BotSentinel estimates that suggest that more than 875,000 users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half a million more were suspended.
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You may recall that thanks to a lawsuit brought by celebrated journalist John Stossel, it “has exposed the left’s supposed battle against “misinformation” as a farce” according to NY Post’s editorial board. “Facebook finally admitted the truth: The “fact checks” that social media use to police what Americans read and watch are just “opinion” it stated. BotSentinel may be just another social media fact-checker.
From the outset of the pandemic, the mainstream medical establishment, government bureaucracy, MSM & Big Tech were aligned behind a lockdown-at-all-costs strategy going as far as censoring contrarian views, including mine.
An analogous narrative developed surrounding the integrity of the 2020 elections, with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson going on record as saying he found ZERO evidence of voter fraud.
Critics of the CotoBuzz Journal Tweets, instead of responding with a rational rebuttal, often labeled the posts as conspiracy theories and misinformation or resorted to use BotSentinel “findings” that showed the posts in the 60-90% or “problematic” range to conclude I must be a bot or trade in misinformation. Twitter itself to date, has shadowbanned The CotoBuzz Journal and censored some of the posts: all of which are fact-based as opposed to misinformation.
The current BotSentinel ranking for the CotoBuzz Journal Tweets show it as “normal”. However. Its BotSentinel “history” clearly shows posts leading up to the 2020 election and onset of the COVID pandemic were in the 50% range. The BotSentinel history no longer shows the CotoBuzz Journal Tweets as problematic, perhaps because the conspiracy theories have been shown to be factual.
Stokeĺ-Walker explains BitSentinel’s criteria as “Bouzy and Bot Sentinel arrived at their numbers by looking at the proportion of users they analyze who had deactivated their accounts or been suspended after Musk’s Twitter takeover, and then applying that percentage to Twitter’s overall user base, which currently stands at around 237 million “monetizable daily active users”. In business, we say that whoever is in charge of the chart of accounts, is in charge of the narrative. In this case BotSentinel is on control of the chart of accounts.
You may recall Elon Musk threatened to pull out of the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter unless the company providesldcaccess to data necessary to evaluate the number of fake users on the platform. If Musk didn’t have that data. It’s doubtful BotSentinel has it.
Based on my previous reporting, I will call any BotSentinel estimates as problematical and more so when MIT lends it credibility. For comparison purposes I have included BotSentinel rankings for Conservative Daily News Tweeter posts – a media outlet LinkedId users have characterized as “purveyors of red meat for ignorant people.” To my surprise, BotSentinel ranked CDN as “more normal” than the CotoBuzz Journal!
I will also conclude the million-plus users Twitter has lost since Elon Musk took over must be either bots or the prolific Twitter users Pew Research characterizes as purveyors of misinformation.
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