If Elon Musk has had a mantra since his takeover of Twitter and attempted rebrand to “X,” it’s “freedom of speech.” But a close second has been “fighting the bots,” a refrain he uses to justify almost every major change to the site, especially the idea that paid verification is a necessary means to that end.
Instead, Twitter has turned into an absolute cesspool of bots to the point where I genuinely feel like I’m being stalked by some of them.
I understand, in theory, why Elon Musk thought there was a significant bot problem on Twitter. As someone with 100+ million followers, his tweets and replies were filled with a zillion crypto scams and such at all times, something I’m sure he saw frequently.
But most users do not have 100 million followers, and as such, even for “mid tier” accounts like me at 150,000 followers, bots were never top of mind. Sure, you’d see the occasional crypto nonsense or the bots that get summoned when you say “I’ve been locked out of my account!” But now? It’s a mess.
Specifically, I and others are now being hunted by porn bots, fake women who attach themselves on every tweet with some variant of “Want to see more?? (peach emoji)” with a censored picture you’re supposed to click on. Presumably the scam here is that they want you to click on a link in their profile that either A) gives you a virus or B) takes you to an OnlyFans page to get you to pay to “see more” as it were.
But it’s the relentlessness of some very specific bots that is unsettling. There is a woman (well “woman,” as in, a picture of one specific woman a spam account has stolen) named “Victoria (heart emoji) 18+” who commented on almost every tweet I made for a solid month and a half. I blocked dozens of accounts, all the same name, all the same girl in the photos, but it never mattered. New day, new account.
Eventually, Victoria (heart emoji) 18+ gave up. Now, I find myself being stalked by a new account. Welcome, Bella (heart emoji) 18+. I also do not want to “see more,” but I suppose I respect your persistence.
This is just utter trash. These porn bots are everywhere and the old crypto scam bots and account recovery bots and t-shirt printing bots still pop up all the time too. All Musk’s moves have not done anything at all to curb this practice. Now, a new requirement makes you pay some small fee as an unverified account when you join to again, fight the bots, but if you are running a mass spam empire, this is not going to deter you.
In reality, this is almost certainly the result of Musk laying off 70% of Twitter’s staff where yes, the site is still functional, but the quality has been degraded and whoever used to actually be keeping at least some measure of the bots in check is now gone, and paid verification is doing nothing, except perhaps replacing Elon’s personal profile crypto bots with blue check Elon simps instead. Checking my block list for this article, none of the dozens of Victoria bot accounts have been suspended or banned. None, despite it being the most obvious kind of spam page in the world.
It’s a mess, and yet another reason we will continue to see drainage to other alternative Twitter clones. Not that bots can’t spread elsewhere, but the sheer ineptitude in which they are corralled on Twitter right now is staggering, especially with Musk’s stated desire to stamp them out as a top priority. He’s either lying, or he’s utterly terrible at it. Why not both.
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