Elon Musk Keeps Lying About One Very Specific Thing

Even before Elon Musk lit a match under a pile of money and agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share last April, he was talking a lot about bots. Given that Musk has a challenging time looking away from the site he bought—that’s part of why he bought it!—he’s probably seen more spam on Twitter than just about anyone. Yes, Twitter had some big number of bots, Musk acknowledged, though it was hard to nail down the exact number for reasons Twitter’s old management explained. The lie came next, when Musk said that paid verification on Twitter was “the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.” It doesn’t pass the sniff test. And maybe, by prioritizing tweets by paid users, Musk really could make it harder for spam tweets to find life in the platform’s search results or replies to tweets.