ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up
from the turns-out-content-moderation-is-difficult dept
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.
Post by @parkermolloyView on Threads
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…)
Filed Under: ai, bots, chatgpt, crypto spam, elon musk, scams, spam, verification
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up”
Now this is funny right here.
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DEI is the woke filth demanding that their favored victim groups be given a pass on their lack of competence, lack of ability, and criminal behavior, while cheering the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews, so DEI is absolutely responsible for evil, or more accurately, for standing in the way of looking reality squarely in the face and trying to find solutions that actually work rather than conforming to the lies of their theories.
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Ah look, it’s a pedophile nazi.
Do you look at your daughter and tell her she’s an inferior sex item only good for being used by men?
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Hyman has probably never had sex in his life.
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If true, that would be especially tragic for someone named Hyman.
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Calm down, Elon.
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Spoken like a satisfied customer of “Rocket Pump”
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My takeaway from this is that crypto spam, AI bots, and Nazis are somehow the solution to Jews getting raped?
Make it make sense.
Nah. Musk’s got different priorities: he’s reducing the price of the golden tick making scams cheaper to pull off. CloudSEK published a nice whitepaper on that a week ago.
At best his personal learning curve has a downwards trend, at worst it’s desperation and milking scammers to stave off financial collapse.
And don’t forget about the smut bots.
I rarely post on ExTwitter, but on the occasion that I do, within a matter of seconds, I am getting likes on a post where the user is nothing but a scantily clad female with a single post that has a link to another site.
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I get a tonne of that too. Was going to post about the porn bots that frequently flood my account. I don’t use Twitter anywhere as much as I used to and just use Mastodon instead largely for this reason. The algorithm pushing far right hate was nudging me away from the platform and the spam bots, including the porn spam bots, pretty much got me to use the platform as minimally as possible. If I’m feeling inclined to post regular stuff, I’m posting on Mastodon instead.
The ads are so fraudulent or for such low quality products that they’re starting to make reputable brands look bad by association
Re: "reputable brands"
are there any reputable brands still advertising on xitter?
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OnlyFans, the most trusted name in peer-to-peer porn!
Here comes the next lawsuit
Self-selection
Scammer: “I wonder if there’s a social media site where users are more likely to fall for bullshit than elsewhere…”
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There’s always Truth Social.
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Truth Social, what’s that? Is that like MySpace?
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Truth is English for pravda.
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Competing against The Donald would be rather difficult, he is a past master of scamming cash from the unwashed masses.
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We’re all the spectators into the endless golden shower that is Trump’s reality. If you’re not a spectator, you’re an eager and consensual participant.
I hope that adding their “peer-to-peer” money system would eradicate this ad-scam problem.
Instead of printing massive amount of ads, the scammer would take the money directly.
Social networks are about connecting people horizontally, right?
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Somehow I don’t think the person who came up with that idea was thinking about the horizontal shuffle though…
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Bob Seger called it correctly:
“Everybody wants to do the horizontal bop!”
(from the album ‘Against The Wind’, 1980)
E.L.O.N. can’t get rid of all the non-human twitter accounts, because if he did there’d be none left that agree with what he says.
Maybe this is all just a MAGA psi-op to get everyone to move over to truth social???
At this stage I really dont care. I quit Twitter when Musk took over. Call it a premonition if you will….
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Truth Social, like all far right social media before it, is like that dungeon in “The Silence of the Lambs” where Hannibal Lecter is confined with other similarly wretched psycho criminals.
They never became the cultural phenomenon that talk radio or Fox News did.
Twitter being transformed into Elon Musk’s $44 billion Nazi Bar just turned it into a clone of Truth Social, the key difference between the cult of personality at the center (Musk for Twitter, Trump for Truth Social).
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“Truth Social, like all far right social media before it, is like that dungeon in “The Silence of the Lambs””
It puts on the MAGA
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Truth Social, like competitors Gab, Gettr and Parler, are all founded with the intent to be far right safe spaces.
Subtracting content and engagement that is due to spam, scams, porn or CSAM, conversations fall along just two lines:
1. Actual Nazi shit
2. “I have been silenced!”
oh no gonorrhea is complaining about herpes
How far it has fallen
Charlie Warzel, who now writes newsletters for the Atlantic, noted that under Elmo’s reign, the fastest-growing category of user-generated content was crypto and porn.
That’s the sad evidence that Twitter has entered irreversible decline. What’s sadder is that crypto and porn content is needed to class up the place.
Elon's done all the hard work for them
Honestly were I running any sort of scam Elon’s changes to the site would have me dancing, possibly literally, with glee. His actions have weeded out anyone smart enough to see through his lying and dishonesty, leaving just the gullible rubes who have a demonstrable track record of paying for garbage so long as it’s framed correctly, making for a perfect selection of targets for any sort of scam an individual or company cares to employ.
No need to mass send out a ton of messages and hope that you manage to catch a sucker or two out of the lot due to sheer volume when someone else’s has already driven out those more likely not to fall for whatever crap you’re selling.
This is just… chef’s kiss.
1 – There are ads on Twitter?
2 – If they are paying Elmo to run their scamvertisements, at what point is Twitter a co-conspirator?
3 – 1000 spambots join, all put the same link in their bio to lure horny idiots to click to get lucky… and Twitter can’t even run grep to locate these accounts.
I guess it is all part of being a free speech absolutist, being a petty bitch and banning people who upset you while claiming its only bad when others do it to you.
… and if Elon would take his cut from the crypto that the scammers drain from wallets, Xitter would be a profit-making business in no time.
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What you call crypto spam and AI bots, I call I don’t have to listen to gay people.
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“What you call crypto spam and AI bots, I call I don’t have to listen to hate criminals like myself.”
FTFY. YW.
Many thanx Elmo...
I’ll give Elmo this much: Many more attractive young ladies are desirous of my friendship today than when @Jack ran the ship.
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Mike Masnick Malding Again
First you were complaining that Musk wanted to charge money to use twitter, and now you’re complaining that anyone can create an account.
In the past 3 days, I have reported to youtube, that they have been delivering XRP scam ads to me, several days later they are still online and nothing has been done.
I dont use facebook much except for boomer family members, but they keep sending me friend recommendation for “friends”, which just so happen to frequently be either sex trafficking profiles or crypto scam profiles.
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I see ads for an outdoor equipment company, multivitamins, Google Pixel and O’Reilley books on YouTube.
Perhaps you’re getting the ads Google thinks you’re interested in, given the correlation between Elon boosters and crypto scams.
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I am a software engineer.
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You’re also a mark.
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Software engineer huh? You must be a bad one because you don’t understand why you get the ads you get.
If you think I’m unfair with that assessment I’ll just note that any software engineer worth his salt can through inference deduce the basic operating principles of a black box system by observing the outputs.
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Nah, everyone knows you’re the revenge porn man.
Even the ads.
Don’t really care what you actually work as (since you and your sort love to lie about everything), but your very public and obvious convictions have apparently influenced the “ads” you’re seeing, as is YOUR FUCKING POLITICAL OPINIONS.
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You spelled “sex offender” wrong there.
I’m a software developer. That’s why I get ads for O’Reilley books.
I’m also not on Twitter. That’s why I don’t get ads for crypto scams.
I post on X-twitter some but I don’t notice ads.
Have fun.