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Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam

from the spam-in-bio dept

Forget Mars colonies and self-driving cars. Elon Musk’s greatest challenge yet? Defeating Twitter’s relentless ‘pussy in bio’ spam army. And let’s just say, it’s not going well.

It has really been quite incredible to watch Elon rediscover some of the basics of trust & safety best practices (though while consistently messing it up) as ExTwitter just gets worse and worse. Before he had even taken over Twitter, he insisted he had two priorities: stopping spam and restoring free speech. Of course, some of us pointed out that those two things were in conflict.

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Spam fighting is a core part of trust & safety, but Elon insisted that he knew better, fired basically everyone with any knowledge on the subject, and then repeatedly suggested that he had figured out how to solve it, only to see spam get worse and worse on ExTwitter, to the point that users are getting really frustrated.

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Most recently, the spam has been in the form of posts with the following, or some variation on this: “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.” It’s been so unavoidable on ExTwitter that it’s become a meme.

John Herrman, over at New York Mag’s Intelligencer, has a ridiculously long investigation determining who is behind all that spam (basically a company doing the modern equivalent of an old phone sex line). But the reason the article caught my attention was that Herrman kicks off the article by highlighting Elon’s evolution on fighting spam. It’s kinda glorious:

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” wroteElon Musk in May 2022. “The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow,” he threatened shortly after the purchase closed. A new subscription service, he claimed, would “destroy the bots” with his new “anti-bot bots.” In 2023, the threat seemed to evolve. “We’re trying hard to stop bots & trolls on this platform,” he wrote in July. “Fighting bot and troll farms is hard,” he conceded. “The bot wars continue,” he posted in an August update. January of this year brought a shift in tone: “Bots are the devil (sigh).” In March, more signals of an extended, brutal campaign: “Stopping crypto/porn spam bots is not easy, but we’re working on it.”

Yeah, so, that was kinda the point of my old speed run post. One of the things that you often learn regarding trust & safety is that there are often good reasons why things are done, even if the end results are messy, and assuming you can magically do better with none of the experience or understanding of the tradeoffs means you’re going to make a ton of mistakes.

Now, it’s no surprise that Musk has failed to stop spam on the platform. Or even that it’s gotten significantly worse of a problem. Content moderation at scale remains impossible to do well.

But, you know, Musk might have done a better job if he hadn’t fired everyone at the company who actually understood how to fight spam and replaced them with his own highly misguided “intuition” on where the spam was coming from. Content moderation is a constant struggle, and spam is a part of that. If Musk could reflect for just one moment, it might be nice if he realized how stupidly over confident he was that he would be able to solve it. And also, how wrong he was to insist that the previous management wasn’t taking the issue seriously.

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Companies: twitter, x

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Comments on “Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam”

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110 Comments
This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Star Trek II

There’s a scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Kirk and Spock quietly talk about the prefix codes and Saavik is perplexed. Ignoring the rather silly level of protection (a 5 digit number), I always liked what Kirk says here. He says to Saavik, “You’ve got to learn why things work on a Starship.”

When you’re not an expert, you need to first check with those who are to find out why things work the way they do because there’s probably a good reason. Now, if no one can tell you why, and this certainly does happen with a lot of frequency, then you can decide to do things differently, but always check first.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Dan B says:

Re:

Also, unless Twitter did a much better job documenting its code and practices than most other rapidly-growing startups do, a whole lot of knowledge was probably lost forever during Elon’s little post-purchase firing spree.

Trying to revamp the anti-spam code gets a lot harder if most of the people familiar with the existing code are gone.

PaulT (profile) says:

Re: Re:

Yeah, he had zero idea of what half the people he fired actually did, and publicly fired people who tried informing him. He’s also not paying the people he fired so there’s no good will, and that takes care of about 80% of documentation in my experience. A decent tech can work out how things are set up, but the quirks of why are now outside of the company.

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mick says:

Musk never understood Twitter or its problems

I live in Las Vegas. Twitter was an invaluable tool during the October 1, 2017, shooting, allowing us to see exactly what was happening in real time, and making sure our friends were okay. UNLV even has a massive data collection of tweets related to the shooting, showing Twitter’s value and how different people used it.

On November 6 of last year, there was another shooting, this time at UNLV. I have friends who work there, and so immediately went to Twitter for real-time updates on what was happening. All I saw — from accounts with checkmarks, natch — was obvious spam (sometimes with thousands of upvotes), conspiracy theories, and some Nazi bullsh1t thrown in. Of course, it’s no longer possible to collect tweets without paying thousands of dollars, so no one can afford to study how completely the two examples differ. How convenient.

The truth is that Elon never understood how people used Twitter. He thought everyone used it like him: to troll people and follow celebrities. The loss of verified accounts removed any real usefulness, and Elon’s actions encouraging bots and spammers put a bullet in its head.

There is no replacement for real-time news, and there likely never will be. Mastadon, et al., will never have enough users for this.

Thanks, Elon. GFY.

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That One Guy (profile) says:

There's also one teeny tiny other problem...

Sacrificial employee: Sir, we’ve identified a swarm of bot accounts!

Elon: Excellent, you’ve taken care of them I assume?

Sacrificial employee: About that… all of them are verified, and over half of them liked your recent post.

Elon: Those are valued users on our platform and shall not be bothered. Now see yourself out and on the way tell the rest of your former team to get back to work cracking down on the actual bot problem, the ones that’s aren’t paying me or kissing my ass!

Tanner Andrews (profile) says:

Re: Re: not a sure bet

Elon will continue to take in tons of money for making things worse

I am not so sure of that. Reports are that some advertisers are cutting back, and real user counts are declining. ALso, it appears that the over all cash flow is such that Xitter cannot pay the money they agreed to pay some folks who left.

I think there were also some landlords who were not being kept current. Also I think he shut down at least one of the server sites.

As a result of such rumors, my guess is that Elon may not so much rake it in, as shovel it out.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re:

Elon Musk could’ve kept his mouth shut and stayed in the good graces of American culture/society by being a slightly eccentric billionaire with a penchant for funding space rockets. But he wanted to be the center of attention so badly that he effectively exposed himself as a drug-abusing right-wing weirdo with a huge case of Dunning-Krueger Syndrome who makes “we should replace CEOs with AIs” sound like a great idea. Now that’s comedy.

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andrea iravani says:

Well, people with experience wrote and abided by the constitution for many years in this country, and then the NDAA destroyed all of the previous experience and wisdom that people had. Now the entire government from the local to the federal level and many sectors can be convicted for high crimes, treason, organized crime, Seditious Conspiracy to Violate Constitutional Rights of the Established Authority – We the People, the Qualified Electors, the Sovereign Citizens, and now America is a third rate third world shithole lawless banana bureaucracy failed state caste system, kleptocracy.

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

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andrea iravani says:

Re: Re:

Fascists in government, healthcare/mental healthcare, and surveillancestate/tech sector have been torturing, terrorizing, and illegally enslaving me, gaslighting me, and vandalizing and stealing my property, for over ten years in this particular round and there have been other rounds, and they murdered my parents, my brother, and my dog. I hate fascists.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

“…nonsense peddlers of the grifter class found examples of what they called plagiarism, but which many academics felt were inadvertent errors in weak paraphrasing, or inadvertent failure to properly cite sources.”
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/bill-ackmans-wife-sends-hilarious-misleading-defamation-threat-letter-to-business-insider-that-confirms-bill-ackman-is-a-censorial-hypocrite/

If we don’t need to cite sources, don’t ask for links

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andrea iravani says:

Re: Re:

No. I oppose electing people that commit high crimes, treason, organized crime, crimes against humanity, seditious conspiracy to vio,ate constitutional rights, and tbat are controlled by lobbtpyists. If that is the type of person that you want to elect, I would like to hear your explanation for it, because those are the choices tbat are on the table.

Shit on rye bread
Shite on white bread
Shit on whole wheat bread
Shit on pumoernickel
Shit on our dough bread

Who in the hell wants to eat a shit sandwich regardless of what kind of bread its on?

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Anonymous Coward says:

The irony is that it isn't a particularly hard problem

Those of us who’ve studied this issue for a long time knew that Musk’s approach was never going to work and we knew approaches that would work. And we said so.

And very predictably Musk ignored us, the experts, in favor of his own hunches and whims…and just as with the Cybertruck, this methodology ensured that the outcome would be a miserable, laughable failure.

It’s going to get worse: spam is one of those problems that always expands to fill any space it’s allowed to occupy, because spammers are perfectly willing to destroy a profitable ecosystem…as long as they manage to extract the last dollar from it before it collapses. Anyone/everyone who’s invested in Twitter should be made aware of this, and encouraged to get out now before it devalues more than it already has.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

The irony is that it isn’t a particularly hard problem

What do you mean by “isn’t a particularly hard problem”? Spam is one of those cat and mouse games which will never be quite completely solved. But yes, there are better approaches to combatting spam than others. The Trust and Safety team that Elon Musk tossed knew some of the better approaches.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

What I mean is that there are people on the Internet who have been studying spam since before the slang term “spam” was even coined. (Various other terms were used before we coalesced on that one.) There are a lot of rather effective techniques whose application depends on the situation: some work for email, some for Usenet, some for web forums, some for all of them. None of those techniques are perfect, but used judiciously in combination they’re effective, scalable, hard to game, predictable, and debuggable. (That last point is important because mistakes are inevitable.)

We told the old Twitter T&S team about these too and they largely ignored us, for the same reason that Facebook T&S ignored us: profit. More users == higher stock valuation, and it doesn’t matter if those users are fake/spambots. But now that the surviving T&S team has been retasked with the single mission of insulating Musk’s fragile ego from criticism, it’s not even worth trying to communicate with them. They can’t admit that they have a problem, not publicly, not privately, not ever.

The bottom line is that while this isn’t a perfectly-solved problem in operations, it’s a rather well-solved problem, and the people who’ve paid attention have reduced it (in their operations) to a sporadic annoyance. Other people have, unfortunately, chosen not to pay attention and well, the result looks like Twitter.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

I’m following up my own comment because a great example of an effective technique has just presented itself in real time.

One of my spamtraps just received a message from a domain called “protrumpnews.com”. The sending system is 192.107.243.105, mta4.america.protrumpnews.com. The “mta” part is a common hostname string that means “Mail Transport Agent” and is indicative of a mail server. That IP address is in a block of 256 addresses (a /24 in CIDR terms) that belongs to something calling itself Psyclone Media. The spam payload is a bunch of pro-Trump propaganda — and an ad/link to MyPillow.

Also in that /24 are a lot of other mta* hostnames in domains like survivalisttimes.com, theepochtimes.com, maga.black, stopworldcontrol.com, etc. – so what we have here is either a front that doesn’t really exist or a dedicated spamming operation catering to right-wing/cult organizations. So while I could block that single host or that single domain, that would be foolish…because I’m just going to have to do it again and again as they crank out spam runs from more of these hosts/domains. Yet this is EXACTLY what a lot of people do, and then they wonder why their methods are ineffective.

So I didn’t do that. I just firewalled the entire /24, which means that nothing on that network can reach my mail servers, i.e. they can’t even attempt to deliver spam.

And when I’m done writing this I’m going to check to see if “Psyclone Media” controls any other networks, and I’m going to firewall those too. And then I’m going to spread the word so that my operational contacts can – if they wish – do the same thing.

This is how you decisively stop spam. You don’t fool around with half measures: once you identify an obvious/dedicated source, you deal with it effectively and then you probably won’t have to ever deal with it again.

Tanner Andrews (profile) says:

Re: probably too late

Anyone/everyone who’s invested in Twitter should be made aware of this, and encouraged to get out now before it devalues more than it already has

That might make sense if there were still a market in Twitter/Xitter stock. However, I think it has been removed from the stock exchanges so that now you or an agent have to find someone gullible enough to give you money.

Elon is not a good mark, because he already had to borrow a great lot of money in order to close the purchase and take the company private. And many other investors will prefer to invest in things which have positive cash flows.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

If you hover your mouse over the flag button text pops up explaining what it does “Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam” The fact that a lot of your comments get flagged to the point they get hidden seems to imply that a lot of your comments contain abuse, trolling, or spam content. You have a few non-exclusive options you could take from here, but I would bet money on you going all in on option 3;

1) be introspective and review all your past comments to find the common themes in the ones that get flagged and try to figure out what is being judged by this community as abuse, trolling, or spam so you can avoid those approaches in the future.

2) review the replies to your comments where the community basically tells you repeatedly what the problems and avoid them in the future

3) play the victim, do/change nothing, and/or whine about how things are not fair for you.

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andrea iravani says:

Re: Re:

I am under attack by hackers. Hackers prevent me from seeing most things on the internet. They will not even let me visit standard websites. It started with Wikioedia being the first site that I could not visit, and I have never written anything on Wkikipedia, I only eard, then yourube, which .i have never had any video if myself on ever, then it just kept going. I can’t even access the NYT, WaPo, CNBC, or most standard websites. I have bought and replaced technology over and over again. The technology sucks. The products are Lemons. I have installed the best firewalls available too. It is just that the technology sucks. Considering that the major tech companies, government, banks, and retailers have also been hacked, the fact is tbat the technology sucks and it us all Lemons. If Bill Gates cannot prevent people from hacking Microsoft, then that is just ridiculous to think that anyone that uses it is doing something wrong and it is their fault if it does not work.

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andrea iravani says:

Re: Re: Re:2

It is not an option that I chose. Hackers are preventing me from choosing options 1 & 2. Wouldn’t that work out great for the psychos if I just shut uo and didn’t complain about their shitty lemon products and narrative of lies while they are committing high crimes, treason, organized crime, crimes against humanity, and seditious conspiracy to violate constitutional rights.

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bhull242 (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3

Hackers are preventing me from choosing options 1 & 2.

If that was true, you wouldn’t be able to choose option 3 either. That’s not how anything works. If you are able to read and reply to others’ comments, there is nothing preventing you from viewing your own or their past replies.

Wouldn’t that work out great for the psychos if I just shut uo and didn’t complain about their shitty lemon products and narrative of lies while they are committing high crimes, treason, organized crime, crimes against humanity, and seditious conspiracy to violate constitutional rights.

First, repeating nonsense like this is part of why you keep getting flagged.

Second, you haven’t demonstrated any of those claims to be true.

Third, how is that even relevant?

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andrea iravani says:

Re: Re: Re:4

You are incorrect on claiming that if hackers are preventing me from visting some websites, that they are going to prevent me from visiting other websites. It is just part of their torture and terrorism. They have a Taliban mentality and want women to be oblivious to what is going on. If this site is managed by a different server than theirs, maybe they just don’t know how to get into this websites server yet to prevent me from connecting to it. I don’t know what the explanation for it is. I am not a techie. But that is just a guess as to one possible explanation.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:5

…I’ve never heard of someone hacking a computer to insert misspellings or false statements into someone’s comments on a blog⁠…

A statement I’ve made a few times myself in the past few days, but I wasn’t addressing that particular steaming pile on this occasion because it was a smaller point than the one I made.

bhull242 (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:

Even if I accepted all of that nonsense as true, what does that have to do with anything that came before?

Like, you can clearly access this site just fine, so your inability to access other sites doesn’t seem relevant here. Nor would you being hacked have anything to do with the content being flagged since you aren’t claiming you didn’t write it, and a hack on your computer wouldn’t cause others to flag you.

Basically, before we even get to whether your claims are true, please explain how they are relevant.

Bloof (profile) says:

Re: Re:

They’d get just as much benefit from it existing and handing over information on dissidents on demand, or blocking unfavourable news and the accounts that post it, all the things the right accused twitter of doing continually but actually has done under Elon when it benefits his business interests in places ruled by right wing autocrats. It’s worth more to the worst people if it exists as a propaganda engine rather than a dead site as it’s userbase will move elsewhere and they’ll be back at square one.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

Considering the relentless replying to itself and the not so subtle chosen pseudonym that abbreviates to “AI”, Andrea Iravani gets points for craftsmanship.

Realistically though, points for craftsmanship in this case is like rewarding a dog with a spray of water to the face for dumping a turd on the living room carpet.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

Spam is protected under 1A, so you can’t stop spam while simultaneously allowing free speech.

The first amendment only applies to the government. Blocking spam might violate the freedom of speech if the government did it, but if ExTwitter does it there is no first amendment violation.

Also, there is no apparent free speech violation in saying “I refuse to spend my money and use my computer(s) to distribute your speech. Buy your own computer and distribute your speech yourself”. That is what sites are doing when they block spam. That is why one hundred percent of people claiming that Twitter or Facebook is denying them freedom of speech are wrong.

It is better to say that there is a conflict between allowing unrestricted speech on a platform versus blocking spam — but that’s a tautology. Obviously there’s a conflict between blocking no speech and blocking speech.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

And Strawb is wrong again. You can’t violate the First Amendment if you’re a private actor, such as a social media website. Therefore, even if a spam filter does catch a genuine comment (as the human spam filter here [the flagging system] does far too often, that’s not a violation of the First Amendment. Read your Constitution, won’t you?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2

Actually, that sounds like one of the exceptions to the First Amendment where the government is allowed to censor, rather than a private actor violating someone’s First Amendment rights. But do go on being completely wrong and creating fallacious arguments in the futile effort of ‘proving’ someone else wrong/

Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3

do go on being completely wrong

I don’t see how I’m wrong. If Person A threatens Person B with lawsuits and/or violence to keep Person B from expressing speech Person A doesn’t like, that would be an attempt to violate the 1A rights of Person B by way of coercing them into silence. That the coercive speech of Person A may be unlawful is irrelevant.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4

If Person A threatens Person B with lawsuits and/or violence to keep Person B from expressing speech Person A doesn’t like, that would be a violation of the First Amendment only if Person B calls Person A’s bluff and Person A goes ahead and files a lawsuit. Up until that point, no First Amendment violation. Looks like you don’t know your own Constitution, either.

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