Experts and ex-employees of the utopian Twitter 2.0 have spoken out since Elon Musk’s interview with the BBC, wherein he claimed that the “bots” that caused a majority of trolling on the social media platform are getting eradicated and therefore there is a lot less spam. But according to the BBC, there are actually hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts on the site, creating “Troll farms” that feed misinformation for the sake of pushing state propaganda.
Troll farms are no new concept, especially on Twitter, however, the crew that used to deal with them has been removed thanks to Musk’s numerous mass firings of Twitter staff since November, the first of which cut the HQ staff of 8,000 down to 1,500.
One former employee said: “The whole human layer has been wiped out. All Twitter has left are automated detection systems.”
According to the BBC: “A new group of Russian trolls is active on Twitter. It supports Putin’s war in Ukraine, ridicules Kyiv and the West, and attacks independent Russian-language publications, including the BBC Russian Service. Many of these trolls’ accounts have been suspended, but dozens are still active.
“Darren Linvill, associate professor at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina, says the network appears to originate from Prigozhin’s troll factory.”
