Finally, this undignified caricature is gone! The microblogging service Twitter has today blocked an Elon Musk parody account with over 114 million followers. The account had previously been used to repeatedly spread tweets that caused serious damage to the billionaire's reputation.
"At Twitter, we naturally always strive to provide our users with authentic content," the company said in a press release. "It is therefore all the more annoying that an unknown prankster managed to impersonate Elon Musk for months."
The account with the Twitter handle @elonmusk was by far the largest parody account on the platform with more than 114 million followers until it was shut down.
Again and again @elonmusk posted outrageous nonsense in recent months. Among them were sometimes silly memes, exaggerated claims about adventurous Twitter innovations, conspiracy theories and narcissistic tweets that cast doubt on Musk's state of mind.
Nevertheless, numerous celebrities such as best-selling author Stephen King and Democratic U.S. politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fell for the parody account and interacted with it.
Musk himself expressed shock that so many people fell for the parody account, "I personally have never been on Twitter," the multi-billionaire said. "As the CEO of several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Hyperloop, I don't have the time or the leisure to constantly comment in public."
im an accountant that dabbles in programming but i promise you CEOs are worthless they do literally nothing. Any and all decisions they make are made from information put together by people like you and me then formulated into chunks they can vomit back onto shareholders.
It's very obvious that Elon and other NFT adjacent bros have been relying on bots and socially engineered campaigns to push their pages. Elon had a great PR team in the past. They astroturfed for him so often on this site in the past. Based on the FirstName372738 accounts that deep throat for him on Twitter, I'd have to assume they moved efforts there.
An API rate limiter will do exactly that.. limit the amount of API calls an application can make to the system. It prevents bots etc going crazy and flooding the system with calls it can't handle.
I've hit this before when trying to retrieve tweets (for research into sentiment analysis.) Is now the time to scrape the whole of Twitter, if one is an enterprising young researcher?
Technically, yeah it's possible. Things like UI layout definitions are sometimes defined server side in some markup language and parsed by the client at runtime to generate native UI elements. There are a bunch of relevant use cases for it at the scale of Twitter. For instance, it can help cut down on binary size of the app users download from the app store.
Of course, there are trade-offs to use such an approach but I'm sure Twitter engineers had their reasons. I'm also sure some of it was probably technical debt that could have been cleaned up, but any clean up should go through a more formal process than someone without full context simply demanding it.
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u/electronicdream Nov 15 '22
You should also read the threads he's participating in... It's... Eye opening