Cuomo/Carlson Conversation

[Valerie]

To be fair, Carlson gets more views on his new Twitter channel than MSNBC gets on their entire broadcasting day.

How many of those views are Russian bots?

Millions logged on to Carlson after the pres. State of the union. He does extremely well

[Ken]

To be fair, Carlson gets more views on his new Twitter channel than MSNBC gets on their entire broadcasting day.

How many of those views are Russian bots?

Millions logged on to Carlson after the pres. State of the union. He does extremely well

Like I said, how many of those are Russian bots?

[Josh]

Like I said, how many of those are Russian bots?

I doubt Russian bots have much to do at all with most of Carlson's shows, most of which have nothing at all do with Russia.

It is a rather strange conspiracy minded person who thinks that everyone who is not politically aligned with him is somehow on Russia's payroll.

[Ken]

Like I said, how many of those are Russian bots?

I doubt Russian bots have much to do at all with most of Carlson's shows, most of which have nothing at all do with Russia.

It is a rather strange conspiracy minded person who thinks that everyone who is not politically aligned with him is somehow on Russia's payroll.

I don't think Carlson is on Russia's payroll. It is just that from what I have read, the majority of twitter bots out there are from Russia and eastern Europe, just racking up twitter hits and making mischief and posting pro-Russia nonsense.

For example, one estimate is that 60-80% of posts on the Ukraine war are by Russian bots: https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitt ... y/1114878/

Up to 80% of all users on twitter could be bots https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-accou ... pecialist/ and Tucker Carlson's show is one of their targets: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... s-increase

Which basically makes any viewer data for big twitter sites like Carlson's completely useless.

[Josh]

I don't think Carlson is on Russia's payroll. It is just that from what I have read, the majority of twitter bots out there are from Russia and eastern Europe, just racking up twitter hits and making mischief and posting pro-Russia nonsense.

For example, one estimate is that 60-80% of posts on the Ukraine war are by Russian bots: https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitt ... y/1114878/

Up to 80% of all users on twitter could be bots https://www.teslarati.com/twitter-accou ... pecialist/ and Tucker Carlson's show is one of their targets: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... s-increase

Which basically makes any viewer data for big twitter sites like Carlson's completely useless.

Video stream viewers are substantially different from "Twitter bots" that try to farm engagement. In particular, a viewer doesn't gain any benefit to themselves (other than watching the video), which is quite different from Twitter bots that spam replies or retweets.

For whatever reason, his streams are very popular (but then again, so is someone like Mr Beast who regularly gets hundreds of millions of views).

[Ken]

From yesterday: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x ... ne/709824/

Basically you can't trust any numbers coming from Twitter. Both Twitter and content providers like Carlson have enormous incentives to inflate their numbers. And they are plagued by bots which can account for 70-80% of traffic which they actually have an economic disincentive to rein in.

As for Tucker. There is something like a 96% variance between twitter "views" and the number of people (or bots) that actually click and view the videos. Anyone scrolling Twitter on their phone who sees 2 seconds or more of a Tucker Carlson post gets counted as a "view" even if they were just scrolling past. Recently Twitter removed the "video view" counter from their app so no one even knows how many people actually watch Tucker or any other video on Twitter. Only how many times people have scrolled past it. That is how you get views in the hundreds of millions. Because so many people are on the "for you" tab rather than the "following" tab on Twitter and so are just scrolling past whatever the algorithm pushes at them, which is a lot of Tucker and other favored "content providers"

Great for Tucker because then we are all talking about how "relevant" he is due to his influence. When an enormous amount of it is just smoke and mirrors.

X Continues To Share Misleading Data Notes, as Third Party Reports Show Declines in Usage

One of the biggest elements of focus for Elon Musk when taking over the app was bots, and eradicating bot profiles from the app.

Which he has repeatedly claimed to have done.

But he hasn’t.

At the numbers of sign-ups that X claims to be seeing, it seems very likely that many of these new accounts would be bot profiles, while X continues to test out new experiments, like charging all new sign-ups $1 to interact in the app, as part of a program called “Not a Bot”.

Which suggests that bots are still a significant problem in the app.

Indeed, recent analysis conducted by ad measurement provider CHEQ, found that of all of the referral traffic driven via X ads during the weekend of the Super Bowl, almost 76% of it came from bot accounts.

Bots are definitely still a significant factor in the app, which would also be impacting its overall usage numbers.

Back when Elon was trying to get out of buying the app, after his $44 billion bid was accepted by the Twitter board in mid 2022, Musk and his team conducted their own review of the Twitter bot problem, and found that the number of bot profiles was significantly higher than Twitter had claimed.

. . .

Part of Twitter’s challenge in combating bots was that there was limited incentive for it to do so, because removing bot accounts would reduce Twitter’s overall usage stats, and thus negatively impact its stock price.

. . .

In August last year, X claimed that an interview between Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump generated 236 million views in the app, though the video itself had actually only been watched 14.8 million times.

The discrepancy here is that X had moved to using its more general ‘views’ figure, i.e. the number of times that a post has appeared in user feeds, as opposed to its slightly more accurate video view count, which measures how many times users have actually tapped on the play button and watched more than two seconds of the clip.

Shortly after this, X removed the video views count from public view, which now means that general users have no way of knowing how many times a video has actually been viewed in the app.

As another example, in January this year, YouTube star MrBeast uploaded a clip directly to X, which ended up getting over 156 million ‘views’, though only 5 million X users actually watched the clip.

That’s a 96% variance in the ‘view’ count displayed on X, and the actual number of people who intentionally watched the video.

Pretty misleading, which again raises questions as to the data that X shares as a representation of what it actually means, in relation to the platform’s performance.

[Ernie]

[temporal1]

Thanks for adding this.
i’ve never followed either man, ever, i wouldn’t have looked for this interview. not a fan.

i’ve paid a little more attention to TC since he’s been discussed on forum. still not a fan.
never listened to Cuomo before. unlikely to seek him out.

i’m about 30min in, it’s ‘way more interesting than i expected.

i’m not sure i’d view 2 hours. maybe.