ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up
Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things.
About that.
Originally, Elon seemed to think that changing Twitter’s verification system into a subscription service would get rid of the bots. That did not work. More recently, he’s shifted into making anyone who wants to post anything to Twitter to have to pay a nominal amount as his solution.
All of this assumes, incorrectly, that it’s not worth it for scammers and spammers to pay tiny bits to flood Elon’s playground with shit.
And flood it, they are.
A report from Bleeping Computer notes that ExTwitter has become completely overwhelmed with crypto scam ads, and most of them are coming from accounts paying Elon his cut. And even Elon’s biggest supporters are getting sick of it.
And it seems clear that it’s worth it to scammers to pay $8/month for access to the absolute gullible fucks on ExTwitter. As Bleeping Computer highlighted last month, one of these crypto drainer scams that has been regularly advertising on ExTwitter was able to steal $59 million from suckers on ExTwitter via purchased ads:
On X, better known as Twitter, advertisements for MS Drainer are so abundant that ScamSniffer reports they account for six out of nine phishing ads on their feed.
Notably, many of the scam ads on X are posted from legitimate “verified” accounts that carried the blue tick badge when the ad was shown.
The account MalwareHunterTeam is out there finding more and more such scam ads on ExTwitter. Here are just a few:
And more and more and more.
Meanwhile, Elon’s other big “innovation” to try to stop the bots was to change the way the API worked so that it charged ridiculous fees to use. Of course, all that’s done is driven away the useful bots, but left the scam bots free to be.
Which brings us to the other story demonstrating Elon’s absolute failure to deal with bots on the platform. Boingboing details how Parker Malloy has found that there appear to be a shitload of fake bot accounts that are clearly running off of ChatGPT. And you can tell that by simply searching for the phrase “goes against OpenAI’s use case policy.” You find tons and tons of tweets using that phrasing, as it is clearly coming from a bot powered by ChatGPT, but where whoever set it up didn’t think that OpenAI would reject their query.
And, look. Fighting spam and bots is a big challenge. And if Elon had approached this with even the slightest humility, you might feel bad for him. But instead, he insisted, without knowledge, that Twitter’s previous management was failing to take the problem seriously, was lying about how much spam was on the platform (even though that was only because he couldn’t understand how Twitter was reporting things), and that somehow he would have the singular solution to solve it.
Instead, he fired basically anyone who knew anything about fighting spam, put in place braindead stupid solutions that anyone with any experience in the field would tell you wouldn’t work… and then made the problem way, way, way worse.
No wonder Elon is now moving on to trying to blame “DEI” for anything bad that happens in the world (someone should tell him that his own companies, Tesla and SpaceX, both advertise their DEI efforts, but alas…)