Elon Musk recently posted a Twitter poll asking whether users thought he should step down as head of the company or stay and keep running the social media platform.
In the tweet, Musk claimed he would abide by the results of the poll—which showed 57.7% of users wanted him to step down and make way for new leadership.
Kyle Rittenhouse apparently felt the need to blame the results of Musk's poll on "bots" and claimed, in his version of reality, there were more people who wanted Musk to stay than to step down—and Twitter users wasted no time in ridiculing him.
Rittenhouse tweeted:
"@elonmusk the votes saying 'yes' are most likely bots and there are far more tweets voting against you stepping down then there are in favor of it. The majority of the people vote NO!"
The supposed evidence Rittenhouse presented for his hypothesis was a screenshot of the trending topics on Twitter. It does show 58 thousand tweets about the subject "Vote NO" and just under 47 thousand tweets about "VOTE YES" but that shows the number of individual tweets, not the number of people tweeting.
One person can tweet a heck of a lot over the course of a day, and enough people doing so might seem incredibly signifiant with this limited data sample.
That wouldn't fit the narrative of "The person I like is losing so it must be rigged" that seems so popular among conservatives these days, though.
It took no time at all for people to start responding to Rittenhouse's tweet and many weren't particularly nice about telling him how wrong he was.
Some took the opportunity to critique voter suppression attempts while they were at it.
Not everyone who voted for Musk to step down even disagree with him or his plans for the platform, they just want someone better as CEO.
Rittenhouse also retweeted a lot of the Elon should stay tweets made by other conservative figures—possibly hoping doing so would boost engagement and conversation about the poll.
Musk has yet to announce if he will truly step down.
All Twitter users can do is wait and see if he honors his word or chooses to pretend the poll never happened and maintain the status quo.
@thekalenallen/Threads
U.S. Mint
