Internet | Why are the likes disappearing from the Finnish researcher Elon Musk’s X-chain?

Tampere PhD student at the university Pekka Kallioniemi published in June on the X service (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk critical message thread.

Now hundreds of users are reporting that someone is removing their likes from the thread. Elon Musk is not only the richest man in the world but also the owner of the X service.

Why are likes disappearing? Is the billionaire trying to censor critical content for himself?

Thing is a bit complicated. It must be explained from October 2022, when Kallioniemi started introducing Finnish “vatniks” in its X message threads.

Russian word vatnik roughly means a fool who repeats Russian propaganda. The first vatnikki introduced by Kallioniemi was a former theater director working as a Russian propagandist Janus Putkonen.

Kallioniemi soon expanded to foreign waters, and the popularity of the presentations exploded. Now Kallioniemi has over a hundred thousand followers on X. The most popular vatnikki demonstrations – which Kallioniemi calls vatnikki soups – gather millions of readers.

In June Kallioniemi wrote about Elon Musk, who often repeats Russia’s views and gets them huge visibility.

From the beginning of the week, Musk published the president of Ukraine in X Volodymyr Zeleskyi mocking meme. Kallioniemi republished his June message thread about Musk.

Soon, X users began to report that their likes for the thread had disappeared. There were more announcements. Some liked the chain three or five or ten times, and each time the like disappeared.

Did X try to reduce the visibility of the critical chain?

Someone made a little program that counted the number of likes a thread received. It proved that every couple of hours a couple of thousand likes really disappeared from the chain at a time.

Thing is still a complete mystery. Neither X nor Musk have commented on the matter in two days, and Pekka Kallioniemi has no better answer than the others.

“It’s confusing,” says Kallioniemi. “There is no explanation as to what could be causing it.”

Users have certainly sent Musk hundreds, probably thousands of messages on the subject. Queries have also been sent to X’s support service, but no response has been received.

Kallioniemi does not believe that X’s employees would clean up likes to limit the publication’s visibility. “I don’t think it’s about such drastic censorship,” says Kallioniemi.

X would hardly have the resources for such a thing. “There are no more hands left there. The service is so largely automated that there are very few employees.”

It must be some kind of bug, i.e. a programming error, Kallioniemi believes. Another option is X’s maintenance feature, which is related, for example, to the fact that the message thread is already a few months old. It might be useful to clean up likes from old X-messages in order to save server resources.

“But this is just a theory, and someone has said that under Musk, X has not generally worked like this.”

Kallioniemi has not noticed that X had previously made it difficult for his vatnik messages to be visible. Some threads get more visibility than others, but there can be many reasons for this, for example, an inconvenient publication time. “Social media are black boxes. We know almost nothing about how they work,” says Kallioniemi.

Rock promontory has studied social media and disinformation at the University of Tampere, but for him, vatnikki presentations are more of his hobby. He has already introduced 230 vatnicks, but the bottom is not visible. The amount of disinformation is only increasing.

“Troll farms have been activated again, and they have never disappeared. You can find propaganda content on pretty much all platforms,” ​​says Kallioniemi.

Kallioniemi bets that the approaching presidential elections in the United States will increase the influence of information explosively again. Finland’s trolls, on the other hand, are in the lowlands, and it’s no wonder they’re excited about the presidential election, when they weren’t even excited about the parliamentary election, says Kallioniemi.