An investigation into the marketers and scammers responsible for X’s most visible — and most memeable — spambot problem.

Spam is hard. No real platform has solved it completely, and none ever will. Spammers evolve, platforms catch up, spammers evolve again, and so on until the last post is posted and the last user signs out. Individual spam tactics, however, do tend to have short lives, and while PIB won’t be with us forever, it’s notable that it has been with us for so long — a consequence, perhaps, of the near-total elimination of the teams that used to deal with such things at Twitter. Long enough to become a platformwide joke. Long enough to become genuinely sort of annoying even to the users who think it’s funny. And long enough to get some idea of who is posting all that P in all those B’s, and why.

  • nick@midwest.socialEnglish
    98·
    8 months ago

    “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” wrote Elon Musk in May 2022

    Option two anytime now plz

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      37·
      8 months ago

      He’s a sociopath, you can’t trust two consecutive words he says and even a single word is a gamble.

    • WallEx@feddit.deEnglish
      21·
      8 months ago

      He then proceeded to do everything in his power to strengthen the bots.

  • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
    592·
    8 months ago

    industry best practices around content moderation, which [Musk] recently characterized as a “propaganda word for censorship"

    Someone please think of the poor scammers and their millions of bots that could be silenced.

  • tutus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    322·
    8 months ago

    That was really interesting to read. A lot of people have been saying that Twitter had got a lot worse since ManBaby came along. Not being a user anymore I have nothing to dispute that with.

    What is interesting is the companies who are arguably making it ‘worse’ (partly) are backing that statement up by saying it’s better than it was for them. Easier to do business. Easier to make money. Easier to make it worse.

    I suppose that’s what happens when the owner sees moderation of this type of content as ‘censorship’.

    Twitter users confuse me. Maybe they double-down on the moderation of their own bubble so it’s not quite as bad for them.

    • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      8 months ago

      People are willing to deal with a lot of thing before it gets to a breaking point - whether it’s a social media platform or anything else in life. Change is scary and many users keep their accounts to follow specific artists/series/topics who may or may not have easily findable alternatives to switch to.

      Add the fact that majority of casual users doesn’t know about other similar platforms or (in case of fediverse) finds them confusing and suddenly they have more incentive to just put up with the problems as long as they can. More so since such change requires rebuilding of communities and relationships.

      Finally, there’s laziness - most people just can’t be bothered to change things in their life unless they have no other choice/choice was made for them (ex. service they used died).

      Why do you think so many refused to leave reddit after the whole boycott drama? It sucks but that’s how humans are. There’s only so much we can care about and social media aren’t exactly high on the totem pole.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
    359·
    8 months ago

    Who gives a shit what the fascists & fascist adjacent are doing on Twitter?

    • gaifux@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1067·
      8 months ago

      Gottem! amirite? Elon bad Twitter used to be so prog now it’s like Pantera and rapists basically luwluw

  • GreenBottles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    8 months ago

    I haven’t touched twitter/x in several years now. It turned into exactly what I thought it would.