Earlier this year, Elon Musk created shock waves with his unsolicited offer to purchase Twitter, arguing that the social media platform plays an existential role in promoting democracy and freedom across the world. Yet in subsequent months, he has attempted to scuttle the deal, claiming the platform is so filled with bots and spam accounts that it is not worth the $44 billion purchase price. A closer look at the numbers suggests that Twitter’s problems are far deeper than bots – and even if the company managed to entirely eliminate them, doing so would not slow its degeneration into a stagnating echo chamber.