Very odd though, no? Why would they use a Trump bot as the public example?

If I wanted to assume bad faith, and at this point I will every time a claim is made with no verifiable proof, I could very easily interpret that post and the presence of a Trump character file as an advertisement basically telling potential users “hey look, this is what he used to steal the election, it’s possible, it’s simple, it’s relatively cheap and you can do it too.” And if you look through the GitHub Issues for the project you’ll see that quite a few people are already currently using it for who knows what purposes.

As someone who works in the field I also believe there are several red flags in the way the article is written and a bunch of contradictions. For example, “hiding crumbs in the code” would generally imply something slightly more sophisticated than a public file that the author himself tells you how to find in the repository with even a screenshot of it.

The main issue for me though is that it is highly unlikely that the owner of X would need to use an external tool that establishes a finicky integration with X from the outside to generate fake content when he obviously has control over the internal private code and data of X itself. It’s beyond naive to think that if they wanted to create fake accounts, fake posts or manipulate the content users see, they would need this Eliza thing to do it effectively. This tool is clearly aimed at people who don’t own the platforms they intend to use it on.

Ultimately though, while I don’t believe this source and story are to be trusted, I still think everyone should know that tools like this actually exist and that something resembling the proposed narrative is extremely plausible regardless.