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Comment by lxmorj | Hacker News Reader

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

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The problem is so much worse than this now. There are dozens of fake accounts under every one of his tweets and it doesn't even seem like these accounts are trying anymore. Their names are sometimes random strings of letters, and they just change their profile picture to a screenshotted version of Musks. Oh and once you report one of these accounts it can take weeks for Twitter to do anything

I also find it so strange that Twitter hasn't done anything to specifically limit these accounts. They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.

> They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.

I'm all for Twitter doing more, especially as they seemingly do nothing at all to combat fake accounts. However I'm sure these spammers could just adjust a few pixels on the profile image and a naive block wouldn't do anything.

Yeah I agree with that. Maybe they'll need a more sophisticated solution that can check for visual similarity. But It just feels like they haven't even acknowledged this as a problem, so I would be happy with any countermeasures right now.

I noticed a TON of Binance related spam when searching for specific ticker symbols (Nasdaq/NYSE stocks, not coins). It's since gone away from what I search, so they're doing something right, but spam is a tough problem.

Finally someone has some perspective on things.

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