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Nothing changed since my last assessment as far as I can tell. My position is NO. Does someone see a reason to resolve this as YES?

When Elon has wanted to suppress people in the past, he's just banned them from the platform. It's certainly plausible that he's trying to be more subtle now though.

@IsaacKing Yeah, but this particular thing doesn't seem to be it

Currently I'm pretty sure that the anomalies in displayed likes is some technical issue. If no new informations appears, I'll resolve this to NO.

Reasons for my conclusion:

• https://twitter.com/Epifrenetics/status/1709268566803910827 this explanation sounds plausible to me

• The pattern of sudden drops every 3 hours is present to various degree in pretty much all old tweets

• I don't see a good reason to remove likes, and only remove likes, if the goal is to suppress tweet somehow

I will stop my tracking. Here is all data I've captured: https://rpominov.github.io/twitter-tracking/

If someone sees a tweet that is:

• old (like from june),

• popular (10k+ likes, ideally 100k+),

• and still relevant (gets a lot of engagement currently for some reason),

please send it to me.

Some relevant links:

• https://hoblin.eu.ngrok.io/pekka – stats

• https://twitter.com/hoblon – author of the stats

• https://twitter.com/kvistp/status/1709176355475046832 – a video that shows how it looks like from a user point of view

Stats moved to https://x-tracker.hobl.in/tweets/1 and other tweets are tracked there now too

Also, I've done a bit of my own tracking, data so far here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xD6iRZp2f01xBPgM8JCKCMNpOImEnPlhPFi2j2yPOOs/edit?usp=sharing

More data from my tracking: https://rpominov.github.io/twitter-tracking/?1674360288445964288

Things I've noticed:

• There're similar regular drops on some other old tweets

• On the main tweet in question the rate of increase between drops also looks unusual (see the last chart "likes per 1000 views", it usually goes down, but for this tweet it goes up between drops)

• Musk's tweets have their own anomalies separate from the fixed period drops pattern: https://rpominov.github.io/twitter-tracking/?1711473290168922362

Also, I've caught my like being removed once, but after I re-loaded the page it came back

https://twitter.com/Epifrenetics/status/1709268566803910827

^ Someone says that this is cleaning of duplicate likes. They claim they saw some related code, so I guess they are a current or former Twitter employee.

I did a bad job describing what counts as YES.

For example if it's shown that the same is happening to other tweets (pro-Musk, neutral to Musk, posted by himself), then the likes are not removed from anti-Musk tweet as title says, they are just removed in general. And I was going to resolve to NO in such case.

Does this make sense?

Since no one disagrees with this, and there're no big bets, I made an edit of the description.

I could confirm with the wayback machine that these downwards jumps in the like data are not completely made up. It is also no secret that Twitter puts much work into removing bot accounts, which will decrease like counts.

This claim being true does not mean that Twitter removes likes specifically because they are against Musk.

@gigab0nus Yeah, I don't think the numbers are made up. If this is because bots are removed, I will either resolve as N/A or NO, because this is more like removing of accounts rather than likes.

I think the rule of thumb for resolving as YES will be if my like of the tweet could be potentially removed because of whatever is going on (doesn't have to be actually removed).