The majority of traffic from X may have been fake during the Super Bowl

Political ads should do just fine.

I was in Hong Kong for two weeks late last year and every time I opened Twitter there I saw a promoted post for a voachinese.com article (something something China bad). It’s always VOA Chinese even though my language is clearly English, and my account is completely passive, never tweeted anything, liked anything or followed anyone, most of my visits are HN referrals about something tech related. It was quite surreal, like they bought the entire ad space of the region or something.

I use Brave for that reason and it’s a totally different browsing experience.

An accident that happens repeatedly, its cause can be traced to a single actor, and that actor also benefits from all of instances of the accident.

Ad tech is weird.

What are you scraping for?

Malicious bots using the same technique as nitter to get into the site, and X blocking them will affect both.

Other people are using the same technique for nafarious purposes so they will at least have to change techniques

Where do you find these circles all the comments are spam.

It's interesting how often the prevailing sentiment of Hacker News commenters ends up being wrong (or misjudged).

Threads, Bluesky or mastodon is your best choice

I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.

I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure Musk isn't personally going through each report to vet them

Depends on your system/browser font?

This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now are in the in group you’re happy even tho you were unlikely to have been censored

Does it?

Does it account for the 13 new sex bots following me every time I log in, or my DMs full of crypto scams?

Great point, I guess.

Censorship hasn't ended, it is simply impossible not to censor.

There is obviously illegal content (child porn, ...) and copyright infringement, you have to censor it or you will get sued and lose. Related is libel, doxxing, harassement, revenge porn, etc... that may also get you in legal trouble. And there are countries other than the US with different laws, for example many European countries ban some categories of "hate speech", and if you want to do business with them, you need to follow their laws.

And there is spam, if you let all of it pass, it will simply drown everything else.

And at some point, you may want to make money. Usually, you start with advertising, and if you want people to advertise on your platform, so you have to be at least somewhat socially acceptable. You also have to please payment processors, if you bring the wrong kind of people, Visa and the likes won't want to deal with you. On that last part, considering Elon Musk past, he may have workarounds, but the reason Visa has a problem with porn is not just because they are prudes. That's because there is a lot of fraud happening here, and it will happen too on a socially unacceptable network.

And yes, even 4chan is censored.

I somehow doubt that the audience that's going to make Twitter money with subscriptions or advertisers are Nazis, MAGA, Crypto Bros, and OF performers. But you do you.

As opposed to the “twitter was so wonderful before Musk and now it’s a wasteland”?

Please. It’s always been a wasteland.

To whome and why?

> to whom and why

To the Nazis that were kicked off or fled when Twitter had decent moderation to let them know Nazi conversations are flowing like wine and they're welcome back.

Rephrasing for people who will react negatively to that. You're making an important point but "dog whistle" assumes some things:

Those are people speaking abstractly about how much more free their speech is*.

I've never heard that common phrasing used, in any setting, to refer to a change in Twitter user makeup, or it becoming a kinder place. Whether I'm in the company of team left or team right, and coding as same team or opposite team.

* yr humble author refuses comment and does not endorse this viewpoint, or that anything changed on this front

The "It's better now" comments are always of the same form, and never any examples of some great discussion. That's lazy, even for a bot.

Please share some examples, I never see crypto scams anymore and pre-acquisition you could go in the replies of any popular account and it would be nothing but that. I'm guessing it's still there but I don't see it because I don't scroll for hours on end and verified posts being boosted at the top suppresses the visibility of any bots. Either way considering how bad the bot problem was before the change in ownership I feel like people have a very selective memory about this problem. I did get a handful of catfishing bot accounts following me a few months ago, but that's about the extent of what I've seen as far as spam goes recently and feeds are much cleaner than they were a couple years back. If you're comparing to how it used to be several years ago then it's a different story.

> It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

I'd like to see an objective proof for this alleged objective truth.

The bigger problem that I see constantly nowadays is cherry-picked information and people outright lying about a picture or video that they're sharing, but thankfully the community notes help a lot with that.

Go ahead and flag this comment for not being prefixed with "Grr I hate Elon Musk!"

I don't care about Musk one way or the other and I don't see any evidence to support your claim. The level of bot activity is no higher than before in terms of comments on tweets by accounts that I follow. But why bother reading comments anyway? That has always been mostly a waste of time.

It's not really clear at all to me, since, eg some people here are talking about getting several bot account follows daily, while for me it is the opposite, where I used to get a lot more bot follows than I have gotten over the past year or so (down from 4-5 per week to less than 1 per month).

On the other hand, I do see a lot more bots in replies (haven't had any reply to me yet though).

Overall my opinion has been slightly positive, my usage of the site is up and I'm hearing far less of people I follow (or those they follow) who have been unreasonably suspended or forced to delete tweets. It feels a lot "wilder" than before, but that's kind of what I enjoy anyway.

But I also don't really engage with political Twitter, I only use it to keep up on space related reporting and weeb stuff. The worst part has just been a lot more engagement farming through dumb statements from content creators who are circling the drain.

...was that really his original intention...

“Stop the bots” was a made-up rationale when he wanted out of the deal.

The original intention was to buy Twitter so Musk would be the most popular man in the world, his comedy would be appreciated by a billion followers soon, and as a nice bonus they’d buy whatever crypto he decided to pump. The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic.

And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

> They make more than enough to afford $7/month.

Sure. But I would expect bot operators to have a vast array of accounts. If you have 250,000 accounts and you paid for a blue checkmark for 10,000 of those accounts. That would be $70,000 per month.

(I think it costs 8, not 7 dollars.)

The surprising thing is that apparently the bot operators make more than $8 _per account_ on average, which is surprising to me.

You don’t need literal stolen credit cards to dodge CCN bans any more. There are so many services today that allow you — without KYC! — to create an online wallet that is assigned a real CCN, and which also don’t present as a “gift card” on systems like Stripe. You just steal or scam people out of liquid assets of any kind (e.g. crypto), and you can then turn those into as many virtual credit cards as you want — all under different names, with different addresses, etc.

Many of these services also allow spending limits to be set on these cards on a per-card basis — which in practice allows the defrauding of any postpaid service, by limiting each card to spend just enough for the initial card verification, and then denying the actual postpaid charges when they come. (Then you close the acct, and open a new one with a new name + card.)

To combat this, we’ve resorted to using grey-market(!) “BIN lists” to determine what CCN prefixes (BINs) are used by the banks backing these non-KYCed online wallets, and just blacklisting all of them. Somehow, I doubt bigcorps are doing the same.

No one that isn't in the small circle of select chosen is paid at all, that is just yet another scam.

I'm guessing the white noise GPT posts are to "warm up" accounts before they start spamming links, to get around spam detection heuristics.

Definitely not in comments maybe in tweets

Ads are a type of spam, so really this is just moving down market.

I never got a porn-bot follow in the 10 years I had multiple twitter accounts until musk hollowed out the company.

You can get unlimited iterations of hydrogen peroxide ED scams.

You joke (perhaps) but I've noticed Youtube recommendations now occasionally serves low engagement videos which oddly works great for cat videos.

I regularly get 100-200 view, 10-60 second cat videos alongside long form content.

If you need some training "data" try Cookie the Calico.

Not defending Twitter per se but I’ve seen partial to full nudity in YT recommendations after watching fairly innocuous but popular videos.

For lack of a better term to describe it if you watch enough “normie” videos it seems to start showing you anything with a high view count. Watch 100 silly cat videos and it will start recommending you celebrities and football and ofc naked girls. YMMV but that’s what I’ve seen. Worse if you aren’t logged in.

At least it’s better than Instagram where softcore porn is the rule rather than the exception

At this point, there's only a few people I care about left on the platform. And now that I think about who I used to follow...this certainly tracks.

That's because Gavin Newsom called up Roger Goodell in what was a perfect phone call, and demanded: "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, four points, which is one more than we have, because we won the game."