Elon Musk, founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Elon Musk seems to be taking his role to clean up Twitter seriously. After being asked by conservatives on the platform to look into accounts that have "fake influence" by such acts as purchasing followers, the billionaire signaled he was looking at the issue.
On Wednesday, following a series of tweets from Musk that indicated he was looking at Twitter issues, the potential new owner responded to conservative personality Dave Rubin’s request that he investigate some accounts, including The New York Times, that were getting poor engagement in proportion to the number of followers they have.
Rubin surmised that some accounts have bought their followers instead of letting their users grow naturally.
Rubin directly appealed to Musk on Twitter. He wrote, "Hey @elonmusk, as long as your [sic] digging, check into how @nytimes @forbesetc., bought their Twitter followers to fake influence."
Rubin then explained, "NY Times has 53 million ‘followers’ and rarely gets 50 RT’s," and added "I could post a [banana] emoji and a pic of a 80’s sitcom star and get more. (See next tweet.)"
Rubin then proved his point with a subsequent tweet featuring a picture of Estelle Getty from "The Golden Girls" captioned with a banana emoji. That tweet alone had over 4,000 likes by Wednesday afternoon.
Musk responded to Rubin’s post, saying, "Yeah, I noticed that too. Pretty weird."
That response generated a wave of responses from Twitter blue-checks urging Musk to look into various other accounts.
Conservative commentator and congressional candidate Robby Starbuck tweeted at Musk, writing, "Same with ‘stars’ of many tv news programs. Total BS follower counts."
The Daily Wire senior editor Ashe Short replied to Musk, writing, "Also interesting that some of these outlets, not sure if NYT and Forbes do it, but others do, bu[y] followers for their writers to inflate their perceived influence."
Wall Street Journal U.S. News editor Anthony DeRosa offered his assessment of the situation, tweeting, "That's true for most ‘brands’ on Twitter, people are more likely to engage with people instead of companies on here."
AMERICABlog editor John Aravosis responded to Musk accusing him of engaging with "far right" nuts. He tweeted, "Elon, do you engage with anyone who isn’t a far right nut? You promote this aura of the wacky engineer who’s in it for free speech, but you always seek to engage with the far-right and their propagada [sic] activists. That’s not objective."
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