Elon Musk threatening to hold off on a purchase of Twitter because of spam is an interesting argument. Granted there are legal disclosure issues, but we’ve known that Twitter is bots for a very long time.

The bot argument often comes up, It’s also mostly meaningless.

Half of Joe Biden’s Twitter Followers Are Fake, Audit Reveals – Newsweek

Like his real-life followers. 

But Twitter really is just a bunch of bots. Much like Amazon reviewers. The problem really took off when influencers came into being. A new wave of sophisticated campaigns were initially used to swell follower accounts in a crude way, but then became machines distributing messages and ideas on a massive scale.

Much of this isn’t even political.

Whether you’re selling one side or another of a war, or dishwasher detergent or a brand of cosmetics, you need followers to bolster your influence and spread your message.

The bot armies routinely follow popular accounts and interact with them to create the illusion of legitimacy. The folks replying to everything with canned remarks or animated gifs may be real, but they may also be bots.

That means most popular accounts have a high ratio of bot followers, it means that any popular trend with have bots attach to it, and it means that any company doing Twitter marketing is likely going to make us of bots to amplify its message.

Basically, bots are to Twitter what spam is to email. It’s an inescapable reality.