Twitter | FRANK BAJAK

By FRANK BAJAK
November 18, 2022

Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers who keep the world’s de-facto public square up and running that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.

Musk ended a very public argument with nearly two dozen coders over his retooling of the microblogging platform earlier this week by ordering them fired. Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they pledge to “extremely hardcore” work by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay.

The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just at it gears up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which opens Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.

“It does look like he’s going to blow up Twitter,” said Robert Graham, a veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur. “I can’t see how the lights won’t go out at any moment” — although many recently departed Twitter employees predicted a more gradual demise.

Three engineers who left this week described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone. While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.

Quite a bit of behind-the-scenes work went into Hannah Dreier’s story on how Venezuela’s ruling party, having successfully squelched most independent voices in traditional media, uses automated robot accounts on Twitter to try to dominate political discourse online.

We started with a few scripts (computer programlets) written for us by a Twitter programmer who wishes to remain anonymous. They were used to passively identify the bots that instantly retweet hashtags issued by various state- and party-run accounts. Hannah then passed the scripts along to three academic groups, who also used programs of their own.

_A Northeastern University PhD candidate, working under the supervision of an MIT adviser.
_The University of Washington’s politicalbots.org team. It did it’s own research, “Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela”
_The Data Science lab at Utah State.

Takis Metaxis on the twittertrails.com project also helped. Their results here.

And we checked in with Emilio Ferrara, part of the team at the “Truthy” project that created “Bot or Not.” – I recommend “The Rise of Social Bots”

Here is a partial image of what one script identified as bots: