Bari-ly followed
Big Tech Alert now has a newsletter. A weekly recap in order to make some sense of the most important things detected by the tool. Warning: a lot of Elon.
This week was a bit weird for automated accounts. The new owner of Twitter updated the rules and banned Elon Jet, and some are wondering: is Big Tech Alert next? I don’t think so.
Bombshells of the week
Elon Musk unfollowed Bari Weiss and her publication, The Free Press, which he recently started following a few days ago. Bari Weiss is the reporter he gave ample access to past Twitter internal documents and systems, to report on a series of revelations called “The Twitter Files”, along with Matt Taibbi (still followed).
This happened a few hours after Weiss tweeted “must read” to a column by her colleague and fellow writer Abigail Shrier, that compared Elon Musk’s new moderation strategy to the old one of the Jack Dorsey era.
Bari Weiss was also critical of the changes in a thread.
The move was dubbed “schadenfreude”, “backstabbing”, or “hilarious”, according to quotes and reactions from other Twitter users, and it was generally a very meta moment.
On the next day, Elon Musk followed author J.K. Rowling and biologist Richard Dawkins. Some users see some connection between these two moves.
Elon Musk also followed and unfollowed Katie Notopoulos from BuzzFeed News. Maybe it was a “misclick” after he joined and abruptly left a live Spaces hosted by her.
He also followed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, youtubers Noam Blum and Luke Rudkowski, YouTube founder Chad Hurley, @amazingmap.
Lastly, Elon Musk followed and unfollowed the crypto exchange OKX, creating a small boom in their token.
Other interesting findings
Tim Sweeney from Epic Games unfollowed Elon Musk, only a few days after following him when Elon pushed hard against Apple’s App Store policies. Mr. Sweeney is a friend of BigTechAlert, and also has been lambasting Elon Musk recently.
Tim Sweeney is not related to Jack Sweeney, creator of Elon Jet.
Kyle Vogt, CEO of the autonomous driving startup Cruise, followed Omar Qazi, a Tesla shareholder, self-professed fanboy of Elon Musk, and longtime critic of both Cruise and Waymo.
Brian Armstrong from Coinbase said goodbye to Neeraj Agrawal, from Coin Center, a cryptocurrency lobby in Washington DC.
Jeff Bezos (I have to update his description too, as one reader pointed: he’s not the CEO of Blue Origin, Bob Smith is) followed Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI.
Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch, followed a meme account of his boss Jeff Bezos. Mr. Shear blocks BigTechAlert. That isn’t fun, but doesn’t affect the tracking.
Slack founder and now ex-CEO (I have to update his description in the bot), Stewart Butterfield, has more free time and is spending some of it on Twitter following meme accounts. Mr. Butterfield follows BigTechAlert on Twitter. He seems fun.
Afterword
BigTechAlert hit a new milestone going over 70.000 followers recently. In the last seven days it had 5.2 million impressions and saw a lot of movement. Here’s a screenshot of Twitter Analytics if you like to see some data. Remember that all our data is are open for journalists.
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