Anyone who’s spent time on Twitter in the past few months especially has probably run into or at least heard of the “P U S S Y I N B I O”-type replies that posts regularly seem to attract.
Why are they so prevalent? Are they actually so successful that it’s worthwhile to do this? I do not understand who benefits from these, because there cannot be so many people clicking on these links that they’re effective… Can there?
In: Technology
Politics aside, i find it very shitty Elon bought twitter under the guise of purging bots, but I literally have never seen as many obvious bots in my life since the purchase.
The site is so, so, so much worse in every way.
There don’t have to be a lot of people clicking the links. There only need to be a small number getting fooled by it. That’s the basic strategy of phishing. The target audience isn’t everyone who knows better but that tiny subset that doesn’t.
Why are they so prevalent? Because Musk’s desire to turn Twitter into a bastion of free speech meant gutting the moderation department, leaving the platform with nothing that could effectively combat the porn bots.
Yes, they work. They don’t get a hundred people per bot and they don’t need to, they only need to catch one horny idiot every now and then and scam him for a thousand bucks to make it worthwhile.
Because bots cost next to nothing, so you don’t need many to respond. Only one person responding out of a million might be enough to cover your costs.
That is why e.g. you did not see a lot of spam calls on mobile until lately: Calling mobile was just too expensive. Now that costs have come down and Whatsapp & Co. exist, everything is filled with spam.
Why?
Elon bought twitter and promised to get rid of bots.
But then made it worse.
Also, he created twitter blue. The more interactions between 2 Twitter blue accounts and “ads viewed:, the more the account will earn.
So twitter has become a land of bots interacting with bots and bots interacting with people.
Bots following bots and etc.
In the end, companies are getting scammed because they pay for their “X amount of views” ads that are getting viewed by bots instead of people.
Users are getting scammed because every single post is flooded with comments by bots and it’s not possible to interact with anything.
The way it’s now, there’s no way twitter doesn’t die in like ~2 years.
Only its “communities” are still somewhat safe.
i swear i went off twitter/x for a while then used it again and all of a sudden all i see are the most ai generated comments, and literal bots, commenting like wtf.
The bots are created that way cause they’ve seen positive results in the past and I’m sure continue to. There are a lot of lonely, horny boomers out there who aren’t the most tech savvy, which are the perfect targets for scammers.
Imagine that you have to ban 10 bots per day. After a few years, some dude deletes the blacklist to promote ‘free speech’. A whole flood of bots is now back to do bot stuff.
Renaming your brand to a porn associated letter does not improve the case.
And people do click links. Even people in IT, who are supposed to know the risks, click on url’s in fraudulent mails. People are curious and the FOMO rate on social-media users is pretty high.
Musk made it such that Twitter Blue users will be seen first. On top of that, Twitter Blue users also get paid for impressions. $5 or whatever it is for twitter blue is a small price for “marketing” and you might even get some “cashback” in terms of impressions.
ELI5? Elon. That’s literally why.
Elon bought Twitter and then ruined the platform. There were porn bots but they were quite rare, and now bots have free-reign over the platform. On top of that he made it so instead of a proper verification system, you can pay him money to be boosted in reply sections. Makes it easy for a bot farmer to just pay a few bucks, and then get their phishing link towards the top of every post.
True user numbers have been dropping steadily, when Elon mentions ‘X numbers are up!” He’s basically just counting the thousands of bots that join every day
Want a fun thing to do? Go to Elon Musks profile, and actually check the profiles in his ‘Followers’ list. A majority is bots lol.
They’re buying twitter blue, so why ban the bots? Any way he can make money off the dying platform that lost over 3/4 of it’s value, he will do.
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