Earlier this week, a user on Twitter/X who goes by the name @MasteroftheTDS revealed on his YouTube channel that there is allegedly a massive army of Twitter bots being employed by Disney. The purpose of these bots is multifaceted, but the primary goal seems to be to increase public interest in their stock market valuation. He has since released a second video detailing how Warner Brothers might be doing the same thing to promote their latest video game, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (more on that in a minute).
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This was all originally reported on by That Park Place, who asked MasteroftheTDS to appear on their YouTube channel to further go over his findings. What he revealed to them is incredibly alarming. According to his research, a high number of “verified accounts” have been recorded regurgitating similar talking points regarding things such as Disney’s share price valuation. The significance of these accounts being verified is that verification requires, at minimum, an $8 subscription to Twitter/X Premium and allows your posts and replies to get priority ranking.
The reason to do this is obvious. If Disney wanted to artificially cause a topic to trend on Twitter, the best way to do that is to have verified accounts all talking about the same topic. MasteroftheTDS would further elaborate on this, including screenshots and compilations of hundreds of these verified accounts, all engaging in the same activity. “Why am I pointing this out?” he asked. “Let’s be fair here. The only thing that we’re seeing is bots. 1.5 million views with 380 likes is such a terrible ratio. But that alone doesn’t count for all these paid accounts responding.”
“These bots are trying to promote this tweet and get certain things to trend. Now, they’re not just doing Disney, they’re also doing ARM, which is a chip manufacturer and is well-known and has a pretty decent share as well. But as you can see, this is recent, where they are trying to make it look like their stock is as good as ARM. They’re putting them together, and they’re trying to show, ‘Hey, look, we’re doing okay.’”
He then teased his viewers by stating, “There is more to come guys, you ready for it? I have them promoting their parks, promoting their shows, all their Disney+ shows, promoting their comics. And I even have some stuff from DC as well.”
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We now know what he alluded to when he implicated DC. In a video that was released on Friday, he showed how Warner Brothers could be engaging in the exact same type of bot activity as Disney. It is important to note that Warner Brothers has already expressed their own displeasure with how their recent game was received, so it’s not unfathomable that they would try and artificially create positive hype for their two hundred million dollar flop.
It would likely surprise no one if Disney and Warner Brothers were truly employing bots to try and increase public opinion of their damaged brands. But this goes far beyond anything that we have previously seen a major corporation attempt. What we are potentially seeing is a massive network of verified and unverified accounts on Twitter, whose only job is to spew out a predetermined string of sentences. These accounts also only interact with each other, which is a dead giveaway that they are not legitimate users.
Without closely examining them as @MasteroftheTDS did, one might not realize the inorganic nature of what is going on. Someone has created an empire of bots that can be deployed at will to artificially start conversations on what is essentially the modern town square. Whoever is running this bot network likely has more than just two clients, as there are thousands of these verified and unverified accounts running rampant on the platform.
Have you noticed this on Twitter/X? Let us know down below!
Yep, I knew it.