This makes automated posting difficult, but not sock-puppeting. When people say "bots", they probably don't mean automated posting, they mean creating lots of accounts to swarm other users with. You don't need much automation to do this; a device farm of old phones and some ability to remote-control each one would be enough to maintain hundreds to thousands of sock-puppets.

Interesting, I wonder if VMs would also work for this purpose?

$1 per hour manual labour would be cheaper more effective than updating scripts against a determined adversary.

Android in a VM.

The 43B goes to Twitter's shareholders in exchange for their shares (and financiers who arrange the deal), not Twitter itself.

On the contrary, Twitter is going to be saddled with some debt that will be used to finance the takeover. But perhaps this doesn't matter to Musk.

Very true, that's my bad.

Hopefully the rise in valuation, and Elon's involvement, can bring in some more money for the company itself for these kinds of endeavors.

Notably yt-dlp is able to extract from TikTok well, without using a headless browser.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/yt_dlp/extracto...