The spam on Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
1. There are a host of requirements needed to get the blue check: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
2. However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue check doesn't go away.
3. So the scam is that some bad guy buys a previously verified account, changes the profile pic and display name to someone else famous, then uses it to phish.
#2 is colossally stupid, and is trivial to prevent (lots of dating sites require profile changes and pic changes to be reviewed before going live). Apparently this has been going on a long time so is baffling to me.
Also, anyone willing to go through the verification process should get a blue check. Right now it's dependent on some Twitter insider liking the account holder (the insanely bullshit "Notable" requirement).
https://alexaanswers.amazon.com/question/24Ryred578w14fHwRNC...
So, you know perfectly well and understood perfectly my point.
This isn't really a solution, because it's already "obvious" that it's the wrong user if you're looking closely. The UI shows "Vitalik.eth [verified checkmark] @scamusername" so you can see that @scamusername is not @vitalik. The problem is that you shouldn't need to look at the light text or hover to see that a verified user is who they say they are, the UI should make it completely clear.
Doesn't even need to be a cause - it's almost October, which means it's "change it to a spooky pun of your regular name" season.
This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it would be a step in the right direction...
That seems like a bad requirement, because I'd imagine a lot of these legitimately-verified accounts go by professional names (e.g. actors, authors with a pen name, etc.) not legal names.
So you can still allow hashtags and emoji and so on being stuck onto names, still allow "spooky" Halloween names, but preserve some kind of value from the verified checkmark.
I don't know how many verified users there are but this doesn't seem like it would necessarily be onerous. Of course, it's still more onerous than just doing nothing about it is.
And it's reasonable to allow name changes - it's not unusual for people to get married, or for companies to rebrand.
But why let people change names without repeating the validation process? It's not like people are getting married several times a year or anything like that.
If you want to tweet under an anonymous pseudonym -- great! We are talking about an optional verification feature for a subset of users who are at risk of impersonation. These people choose to participate in this program because they want their identity to be clear and legitimate.
Celebrities are the obvious example, you probably know who Eminem or Lady Gaga are, but very few people know who Marshall Bruce Mathers III or Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta are. Others might also want to have their title in there names, for example presidents, professors, kings etc.
They just don't get to change the name or image on the account without going through a manually verified update process. Pretty trivial, a singer goes on a new tour and wants to use a new headshot, checks out faster than reading this paragraph. A cracker hijacks the account and wants to change it to Vitalik Buterin, also pretty obvious to deny, as this is clearly a different identity inconsistent with the previous one.
For example if Ed Sheeran changes their profile picture to an X, how do you know he means his Multiply album and not some terrible Lil Nas X impersonation. What about if a performer changes their stage name? Can we reliably expect Twitter research this change and know that its the same person?
Um, yes — it is their job. Most will be easy and some will be harder.
I understand that some small subset of people can have different public-facing roles. Perhaps the solution is to allow two accounts for each? After all, one can have one for your person and one for your company.
or you know, women changing their surnames after getting married ...
I don't know if I agree with this solution, but it is bizarre that there are plenty of blue checks where neither their twitter @id nor their display name have anything to do with their actual name. Who is the blue check verifying that they are?
I propose showing the verified identity (whether that's a stage name or whatever) on mouseover on the blue check icon. I'll take my consulting fee through paypal.
This is exactly my issue with the whole phenomena. They're utterly useless as anything but a weird form of status symbol.
Hell, Twitter may as well sell them, might help with the revenue issue.
Though clearly they should disable name changing post verification or something so the checkmark itself doesn't help to impersonate others.
Which is why I said that.
Edge cases which can get people irreversibly dead. Doesn’t seem like the right direction to me.
afaik twitter will remove your verification status if you do this maliciously. Like trying to impersonate a famous person and make it look like they're saying something stupid.
Just checked, and the account from the screenshot is still around and still verified.
5. Report targeted user for mimicry/impersonation.
6. Targeted user gets insta-banned.
> If changes to your account are misleading or substantially alter the persona present on your account
You will lose the badge if you try to do the 2nd. But currently it doesn't proactively apply preventative measures, which is definitely a problem. Twitter obviously doesn't have bandwidth to proactively prevent all those scams, but at least last reviewed profiles should be visible to users for verification.
Easier than going through all the channels. Not sure if this still works, but a clever hack to get around (at the time) a very long process to get your identity verified.
And maybe not too similar but the mayor of my city only has a couple tens of thousands of followers but is definitely known by everyone who lives in it and yes has a blue check.
How famous is famous enough isn't a question with an obvious, or single answer.
I worked at Twitter and built the verification service. I recalled that this was the case back in 2012. You couldn't change your name or username if you were verified (or if you change one of those, you would lose the checkmark).
So if you're saying such changes for verified accounts have been disallowed since 2012, and if my dates are somewhat accurate, then I don't think that's right. But maybe you're just saying it used to be disallowed around 2012, not that it became disallowed then.
You still can't change your username. You can change your display name, however, and I believe that's always been the case.
- “Corporate, Inc. @ tradeShow Hall A”
- “DisplayName / A Trusted Brand”,
- “Individual (LIVE 09/21 21:00-)”, etc.
Profile pics change for similar reasons. screenname(@username) is the only bitwise consistent visual element for a Twitter account so there will have to be either a magical audit algorithms to verify user perceived consistencies for changes, or simply a degraded experiences with impacts on engagements for verified users, to enforce that.
>If changes to your account are misleading or substantially alter the persona present on your account
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
Honest question: what do Twitter's army of engineers and designers actually do every day? The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
They work on more dark patterns to force you to give your phone number or to create an account to read a tweet.
I just never give my phone number out anymore, no matter what because it will be used against me. Even google is trying to hold my account hostage, luckily they have an email forwarding feature so I no longer need to log in.
Incentives. If the expected value of a single spam message is in the micropennies, then you have to send enormous volumes of them, which can easily be detected by automated tools.
Cryptocurrency changes this. Now an account hack can net the attacker millions of dollars. This means you can send many fewer messages and invest much more time in each of them.
I still do, but I used to, too.
I've probably used Twitter for 1 hour+ per day, every day, for years. I hardly even notice the spam. What am I doing wrong? Is it targeting specific niches? Clearly something is working.
Like this https://twitter.com/mdj7282/status/1563203203490992128
He worked about 2h/day. When he _was_ working, it was on a 5 person team whose sole job that quarter was to implement (from scratch) some JS games and stress relief activities to be played by their content moderation staff in their mandated 10min breaks every 30min.
He was on the team for probably 5 months before he quit and found another job to continue coasting at, and not once in the whole 5 months did their team deliver anything tangible. From what I understood this sort of dynamic was pretty par for the course at Twitter.
I imagine in 50 years companies like Twitter will be used as case studies in business school for how chronically woke-obsessed middle management and career political justice warriors had a measurable tendency to kill otherwise profitable companies in the 2010s-30s. There is just 0 financial justification for the business and management frameworks put forward by these folks, and getting to peer into the Twitter corporate chat, team makeups, hiring processes, and general political climate made it clear to me how much poor money is being spent at many of these companies, and that when the song eventually ends, I'm certainly not hoping to be the one holding the bag.
As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it disappeared the moment you changed your “display name” but we can’t have that!
Just requiring 2FA for checkmarked accounts and an ID confirmation to remove said 2FA would eliminate 90% of the scams already.
1. three dots
2. report spam
3. welcome message start report
4. who is this report for? myself, some specific group, everyone (??)
5. general info (attacked b/c of identity, harassed, spam, ... )
6. how is he doing this? (Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links, +6 more similarly verbose)
7. yes continue
8. submit
9. done
It used to be like 2 or 3 about 6 months ago but I remember after Musk started complaining they responded by somehow making it worse.
Also most of the reports are centered around harassment or racist comments when 90% of the bad content on twitter most people deal with is straight up scams. There should just be a big this is spam button.
This is obviously self-serving but seems like it may at least be a "consistent" world view where they aren't totally cynical.
1. Myself
2. Someone else or a specific group of people
-- This Tweet is directed at or mentions someone else or a specific group of people — like racial or religious groups. Everyone on Twitter
3. This Tweet isn’t targeting a specific person or group, but it affects everyone on Twitter — like misleading info or sensitive content.
For the same Vitalik spam tweet you see everywhere, I'm guessing 3, but its kind of weird question
Then "Everyone on Twitter is being ..."
1. Attacked because of their identity
2. Slurs, misgendering, racist or sexist stereotypes, encouraging others to harass, sending hateful imagery Harassed or intimidated with violence
3. Sexual harassment, group harassment, insults or name calling, posting private info, threatening to expose private info, violent event denial, violent threats, celebration of violent acts
4. Spammed
5. Posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages. Shown content related to or encouraged to self-harm
6. Shown misleading info
7. Offered tips or currency — or encouraged to send them — in a way that’s deceptive or promotes or causes harm
I guess spammed, but I'm pretty sure its a malicious link and misleading, so either 4 or 5 or 6
Then, "How is @... doing this?"
1. Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links
2. Misusing hashtags, such as unrelated hashtags and large number of hashtags
3. Sending a lot of aggressive, unwanted, repetitive or unrelated replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages
4. Fake engagement, such as aggressively Retweeting or buying and selling Likes, replies, or other Twitter features
5. Using multiple accounts to interact or coordinate with other people to manipulate accounts, Tweets, or other Twitter features
6. Following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts so to inflate follower count
7. Something else
I guess its a deceptive link, but I'm not sure because I didn't click on it. I also didn't click 5 on the previous step which was "posting malicious links", I clicked spammed. But he's also using repetitive or unrelated replies so maybe 3 as well? And almost certainly the person running the scam is using multiple accounts.
That's a lot of words to read every time, and I'm pretty sure it has changed since I started reporting stuff regularly.
One thing Twitter certainly has to deal with is hordes of people reporting tweets, even if they're "ok" - I have to believe every single Trump tweet received hundreds if not thousands of reports immediately upon posting.
I can't believe it's not easy to filter those. Who uses 10 consecutive weird chars in a message of 15 chars? And most of those are numbers.
I stopped reporting because clearly YouTube doesn't care. And there was a more clear case a couple of years ago with inappropriate comments using sexualized emojis. YouTube did nothing until the outrage got to the press. It's like they only focus in finding excuses to demonetize people leaning into wrongthink.
Say something “offensive” to the right person, and your account is frozen by the end of the day.
I was getting around 300 spam replies to comments on my videos per week up until the alpha started—now I'm getting 0. So maybe they finally cracked that nut, but I won't count my chickens before they're hatched.
I still run YT-Spammer-Purge[1] daily, but it's come up dry for the past week now.
They're so similar to each other that manual rules would suffice to cull them, AI my ass.
That would be a very smart policy, but twitter is too afraid of inconveniencing psuedojournalist professional hand wringers and their pressing need to update their display names with the emoji that shows they Care about the important issue of the month.
Or to be even more blasphemous, perhaps Twitter should hire humans to review changes to bluechecks' display names.
You're welcome Twitter, no need to thank or pay me (unless you want to of course!)
I wonder if its an issue of being tangled up in internal bureaucracy, or not wanting to implement one-off solutions to glaring issues that can't be generalized. Certainly a management failure somewhere.
I do wish they'd ban blue emojis at the start and end of display names. I see that all the time logged in or logged out.
However, I don't know what they can do here. They set up the system where the users respond to blue checkmarks positively. Adding another layer of blue checkmark is confusing and silly, but having it be gamed is also not good.
The (verified) account bio is "Official Account of the Directorate of School Principals, School Supervisors, and Tendik, Directorate General of GTK, Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology" (translated from Indonesian). It's probably a legit account that got compromised; tweets from a few days ago are all fine (and about Indonesian politics and the like).
So basically, the problem isn't really with the blue checkmark as such; it's useful to verify this is an official government account rather than some random guy; the problem is this account got compromised somehow.
For the people reporting these things on twitter, there is also "report an account" which is less clicks.
Like maybe if someone's account suddenly has 5+ mutual connections reporting it as "maliciously taken over" you can shadowban it and not have it continue to spam everyone on their friend list? Like it's not that hard.
I recently signed up first time after like 8 years to follow a handful of interesting accounts. But only maybe 20% of stuff I see is actually from them, the rest is all suggestions by twitter what people/topics I should follow or what people that the people I follow follow posted, etc. And there only seems to be ways to show "fewer" of something, not get rid of it altogether. Completely useless. I reckon there are third party apps and browser extensions to filter this, but since I don't care about those few accounts I follow enough either, I couldn't be bothered and deleted my account again.
I'm not sure about a mobile app, if that's what you're using, but on web at least it's the stars-icon-button in the top right of the feed.
I've done that a few times over the years and have always later ended up deleting my account for the same reason I didn't have one in the first place. Then I realized how silly it is to sign up to follow someone when you can just bookmark their profile and check up on them every now and then—the same way anyone not using RSS would "follow" the Web sites they were interested in ~15 years ago.
Following one used to work, for reference: https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
(Didn't end up implementing; easier to abandon the platform altogether and deny anything purportedly attributable to me.)
HELLO. THIS IS MARY. I AM A HUMAN WITH SOFT SKIN.
Several options:
* Spammers creating accounts and posting human posts in advance knowing they'll be used for spam in the future
* Account sold by the actual owner
* Account compromised and repurposed for spamming
The economics of it are interesting, the accounts can be expensive. But it must work out otherwise nobody would do it.
See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32662123
(edit: that was instagram, but its probably the same idea..)
Instagram is no better, bots comment some obvious scam statement "Who wants to see me naked" with 140 likes on a post that was just created. Instagram doesn't want to address the problem because it gives them fake "user" numbers.
;)
This is only a problem for certain blue checks.
The problem is thus amplified because these big dawgs are moaning about it.
Forgive me for not caring.
This is like King Charles the 3rd complaining about his dripping pen (true current news story). I'm sure it incredibly annoying to him but to the rest of people it's laughable.
I'll accept that it's a problem for followers of these big dawgs.
But maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.......
Given the enormous amount of stress and pressure he is currently under, not just as the new King, but also having just had his mother die, I'm impressed at his composure. I suspect most of us would have snapped and shown far greater emotion.
I have deep compassion for him for the loss of his mother. I have zero compassion in terms of the position he finds himself in. With the support he has, he could run his life on auto-pilot. By comparison, I'm more impressed by the average Joe or Jane in the street holding down their lives (often alone) while coping with that loss. And I'm damned sure that a leaky pen wouldn't be their breaking point.
(British Monarchy is the only time calling ones self a "Republican" is palatable thanks to the Americans)
This isn’t a Twitter problem, it’s a symptom of the fact crypto is full of hucksters. If you lie down with dogs you get fleas. The rest of us have a 99% spam-free experience.
I did notice crypto-inclined people (Elon Musk!) do attract a significantly higher number of obvious bots in their replies.
I deleted my account half a decade ago and haven't missed it.
The only spam I've seen is on #hashtag searches, especially #covid19 (with, in 2020 a ton of k-pop spam for some reason) and various crypto folks (with more spam in replying to true believers than sceptics, make of that what you will).
I find that Twitter and LinkedIn still bring me and my projects visibility. It helps my career (though the ROI might be better on other activities, tbh) and some people joined my team because they knew me from Twitter/my podcast. Every once in a while when I finish a small library or host a meetup event, I publish them on Twitter.
I don't engage in fights, I'm not an activist on the platform and I don't try to "growth-hack" and come up with cheesy threads to boost my profile. When people still try to start some fight on Twitter, I ignore their comment until they forget about it, especially if it comes from people who always stir up controversies. I don't block anyone, but I use the mute button often. I mute if someone posts threads, edgy hot takes and if someone is too political (even if I agree with them).
There are good technical content from many of my follows, but somehow "thread spam" that's designed to inflate engagement numbers still leak into my feed. Political and social activism get into my feed, too. When this happens, I mute, unfollow, click "not interested" etc to keep my feed in an acceptable shape.
I ignore messages asking me to do stuff for them for free, asking me to debug something, etc.
The political commentators that I like, I browse without ever liking or retweeting their stuff.
I feel that this way I get something out of being in these platforms without sacrificing my mental well being.
The few times I hit twitter.com, all I see is a Facebook-like list of popular/highly 'engaging' tweets, and all the interesting stuff I care about is buried somewhere deep in the infinite scroll.
My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that stupid "log in" pop-up.
The news about the Osama bin Laden raid first broke on Twitter. The news of the Mar-a-Lago raid first broke on Twitter. News of Heartbleed first broke on Twitter.
Every other platform has basically abandoned efforts to compete with Twitter in this area. Reporters are on Twitter because it’s faster than their own news sites. Google piloted a “real time search” product and gave it up.
In addition, I find a lot of hilarious humor content there. It’s amazing what jokes can fit into 280 characters and a couple image or short video files.
I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech expert, artists, authors, and musicians.
It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but it's definitely worth it to me.
- There's a lot of really funny posts
- Anything notable that happens on other platforms will make its way there pretty quickly
Content. It's the only form of social media I use.
I don't really Tweet, I just consume. Once you follow people who are pros in subjects you enjoy, you can endlessly find content on the subject. No medium can react in real-time like Twitter. Plus, it's super convenient on the phone. As I mentioned in another comment, I hardly even notice any spam.
Though some people are talented they can't help but bring politics into everything, and its just depressing to see the brainrot, I have to unfollow those people or block them sometimes if it's bad enough.
I do make an effort to only follow people I found interesting, and to unfollow uninteresting accounts. Something which you can't really do here, sadly.
https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Averified%20%22giving%2...
Edit: The best one so far, replying to @POTUS: https://twitter.com/IYCKarnataka/status/1570126180791242753
> Follower or Mention Count: If your account is detected to be in the top .05% follower or mention count for your geographic location, it may count towards notability evidence for certain categories.
Emphasis mine.
The other listed sources of "notability" are things like news coverage, IMDB references, and Google Trends. So for example, an elderly state senator who "never quite figured out the socials" would not have millions of followers, but would be eligible for verification because they are notable for other reasons.
The follower count thing seems more like a bolster for influencers and such. They won't have industry references, given that they aren't really in an industry per se, and they won't probably won't end up on the front page of the NYT just for having lots of followers. But nonetheless, it's in the best interest of both the influencer and Twitter to avoid having phonies of the influencer promoting scams.
Forgive me, there are enough cultish Elon worshippers around that I can easily give credence to this theory. In fact, on the balance of probability (given the fanatics and Musks powers), I would say it is actually the most reasonable explanation.
It eventually pissed him off enough that he figured that buying the company was the only way to solve the problem.
He might be right about that.
The "following"-thing hasn't worked for me for around a decade, there's just too much garbage in the stream or main page or whatever it is called.
And for a couple of months now I've noticed that when I use it on a device which is not logged into Twitter, usually because a Reddit post leads me to it, it has agressive Instagram-like tactics in wanting you to log in or sign up and in that state has the same aggressive, unwelcoming vibe which Pinterest has.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter.
How to use advanced muting options
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...
This was viewed as "encouraging self harm" so I got a lifetime ban.
Yes, it was my second offense. A week or two earlier I had tweeted "I wish anti-vaxxers would go jump off a bridge". So that was two strikes and I got the lifetime ban instantly -- within less than two seconds -- while also being informed that my lifetime ban had been "after careful review".
In any case, I'm a real human being and I can't use Twitter anymore.
So the bots run free, but my obviously human account got a lifetime ban for tweets that could not possibly be seriously construed as dangerous. Honestly, the tweets are barely noteworthy. Also, I had something like 28 followers and I was little more than an occasional reply guy.
Also, aside from the bots, the amount of absolutely ridiculously bad taste stuff I see tweeted that doesn't result in a lifetime ban is astonishing.
Supposedly I can appeal my ban but I haven't done so because I'm dead certain that if I do I will just get an even more solid lifetime ban, along with all my personal details stored in their list of atrocious actors. I guess I'm holding out for Elon Musk to be forced to buy Twitter and for some changes to take place.
Yet, Twitter as a product lost focus many years ago what they want to be and for whom.
The product has terrible discovery and search. Velocity is super-high so you are missing posts all the time (and people miss yours).
And unless you have an audience already it is broken for 99% of the users for content distribution.
Further, I am convinced that a lot of the reported "users" are copies of the same person behind it, bots, or apps.
All of this was motivation that led into building finclout. Having identity/reputation managed on-chain IS a use case where blockchain makes sense. and is really important to understand if a source is credible or not. There is a lot of spam, fakes, and pumps on Twitter which makes most "social sentiment" ML models worthless.
For as much as everyone complains about Twitter, there is obviously value in the product.
Scrolling through my main feed (on the official web/client) is utter garbage. Sponsored-this, suggested-that, your-friend-liked, your-friend-also-follows, etc. Kill me. I want to read tweets from the specific people I follow, I don't need suggestions, I don't need the algorithm, I sure as hell don't care about followers-of-followers-type shit. The notifications I get from Twitter are also terrible, like I've given Twitter more than enough info over the last decade+ that it shouldn't be showing me certain suggested tweets (or whatever they call that block of random tweets they inject under a tweet I'm looking at).
Twitter, like most large tech companies, astounds me. I literally have no clue what their thousands of employees/"engineers" do everyday. I work at a tiny company (<15 total, 6 developers) and it feels like we make way more forward progress in a month than twitter has in the last decade. For over 6 months they completely broke their browser notifications because someone renamed their Twitter account to "tweet" and so browser notifications would open that user's account instead of the tweet it was being linked to (the URL the browser would open would be something like /tweet?id=XXXXXXXX). It's fucking ametuer hour over there and they are wasting their time on adding things like podcasts to Twitter? They doesn't deserve to succeed.
I've been developing a site a bit like Twitter except for sharing links only. If it had millions of users (which would take a miracle), it wouldn't have these problems. There are no top accounts, trending topics, follower counts, algorithmic recommendations, etc. Instead, you just follow whoever you know personally or seriously care about, and if you like something, you repost it since there's no plain "like." So you can get links from many hops away, but it has to go through a friend. This establishes a self-moderated network similar to how people in real life behave. In closed beta, I've discovered a lot of interesting content (mostly news) that I otherwise wouldn't have, but the project has ways to go.
Moderation will never be perfect, and IMO it's better to err on the false negative side
Changes should be limited to adding a hashtag at the end of the display name. Other changes should result in temporary loss of the verified badge until they undo the change.
As for profile pictures, they should be using perceptual hashing to detect similar profile pictures. This isn't particularly hard anymore. They might already be using it to detect copyrighted content, or perhaps they can contribute to existing open-source libraries.
'There's such a thing as too little fraud' is a take I saw somewhere recently.
Ben Franklin + Alexander Pope both used almanacs, a social media analog from their era, to fake the deaths of opponents (in Franklin's case it was an opposing almanac publisher whose death he predicted in his first issue).
I have always assumed screen name and badge are just-in-time, reflective of present account settings, modulo caching etc., and not pinned so to speak to their state at the time of a Tweet.
It's got to be the case, or you could just keep flip-flopping and have a dialog with yourself that looked at a glance like an actual interchange (until the account handle was examined)...
It's pretty obvious when you read it with common sense but when you initially see it, it looks legit.
Browsing my feed on the first one is actually fun! No spam, no bots. Given most of the people I follow aren’t big household names.
The second account is basically crypto and OF spam everywhere, but that just follows the opposite kind people.
Forgive me for not being that sympathetic.
Interesting how it's becoming a major issue now (I mean, it has always has been for big accounts) since the Musky Douchey Hypeman requires it to be a major issue in the upcoming court case.
Personally, advertise yourself with the stench of manure and expect horseflies.
It was not a great start.
A couple of weeks ago, Matt Levine predicted that would happen:
> If you have something to do with Twitter, or you know something about Twitter, or you are in the business of counting Twitter bots, then you should take a few minutes and ask yourself: Well, do I know anything about Twitter doing any massive frauds? If you do… look, I don’t know exactly what you can do with that. (...) Still. I just have a vague general sense that saving the richest person in the world $44 billion is a good career move.
> So you should expect that, over the next month or two, as Musk’s trial date with Twitter approaches, people will be popping up to say “oh sure Twitter is a fraud, massive fraud, totally, I have proof, Elon, call me.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-23/amc-go...
Well, Musk waived due diligence, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While all spam is bad, scams posted from a fake "verified" account are particularly odious.
It is, he's been tweeting about it constantly prior to the Musk acquisition.
Twitter's claim was always about monetization accuracy: that <10% of ad impressions are shown to bots.
If you read the threads under certain people's tweets (or anyone's tweets containing cryptocurrency related keywords) you will have no choice but to wade through copious amounts of this muck.
Granted, I would consider 99% of what pg would likely consider "legitimate" cryptocurrency content to be de-facto spam, but that's just a part of being on the internet at this point. The problem he raises seems negligible in comparison to the other commercial content that pollutes twitter.
To improve various aspects of the platform as a privately owned company and turn it more into a town square..?
Nobody who is mentally all there has ever claimed that Twitter is perfect. It’s just weird to me that everyone is acting surprised when the truth is Twitter has been getting hate since day one..
No, that's one of his "stated" reasons. His actual reason is unknown.
/s
The statement works just as well without it.
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137
> As use of the internet has expanded there has been an increasing awareness that online content and activity can cause serious harm to users. There are growing levels of public concern about online content and activity that is lawful but potentially harmful. Whilst harmful content may fall short of amounting to a criminal offence, it can have damaging effects on individuals - creating toxic online environments and negatively impacting a user’s ability to express themself online.