see my "final pretrial Twitter thread"). I'm not like those New Year's resolutioners starting to smoke again a week later. This post is not about the trial itself or the antitrust matters involved, but about suspicious social media activity of the astroturfing kind.
It's publicly discoverable that Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney and I follow each other on Twitter, and sometimes retweet or like each other's tweets. Other than that, I don't know him and I'm 100% independent from Epic. I have my own app store issues.
In recent weeks there's been quite some suspicious activity on Twitter. I was not the only one to notice various recently-created or mostly inactive Twitter accounts (no or few followers, hardly any tweets) that chimed in on App Store antitrust discussions with typical Apple talking points. To be clear, there are legit "fanbois" and there may also be cases in which, for example, an open standards fanatic ignores web app shortcomings (like Richard Stallman's attitude that Free Software may lack functionality or perform suboptimally as long as it's ideologically correct). But when there are accounts coming out of nowhere with talking points that independent software makers would never ever agree with, there's an obvious explanation for that phenomenon. It doesn't necessarily mean coordination, nor is it likely to be organic.