I don't think Twitter/X know for sure who the bots are, since Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages, yet I still get lots of spam DMs (as do others with far fewer followers/reach).
replyEven if 95% of the spam gets actively reported and dealt with, that still leaves a ton of nonsense on the platform, getting fed into the LLM. And spam has only gotten worse over the years, as the barrier to entry has lowered and lowered.
Are the spam DMs advertisements or more generally something linked to a product or service? I wouldn't be surprised if X is more lenient towards bots that pay them for adverts.
replyMost of what I get seem to be advertisements or automated messages if you follow large(r) accounts.
replyOne of the most interesting things that I've noticed is these advertisements will be triggered if you follow accounts that are positioned as influencers. I followed one out of curiosity and received a DM from that account advertising some cryptocurrency service.
It's a good way to filter out and block accounts that have almost certainly not grown organically.
I'd have guessed that at least some of the bots are Twitter itself, trying to draw you in with some sense of engagement. Given that Musk is the owner, and everything we know about him and have seen him do, I'd not be surprised if some of the MAGA bots are his too.
reply>Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages
replyYou know people lie, right? Especially when the lie casts them in a better light and/or makes them more money.
Elon lied on record many times, admitting to the lies only when forced, under oath.
replyHighly doubtful seeing as my 14 year old twitter account got caught in a recent bot ban wave with no means of contacting a human for recovery.
replyThere is bots everywhere, it has nothing to do with the platform, it has to do with attackers having an incentive to do mass account farming, no platform is secure against it.
replyWith banning and deboosting they need to be very accurate but with filtering they can be more liberal in excluding
replySuper easy, just make a web-of-trust type of thing: messages are only visible to those who already vouched for you. Otherwise, you pay $0.01/per message/per user reached.
replynot really. there are easy heuristics to filter out bots with good confidence. FWIW i don't see any bots posting anything in my feed
replyYes your individual feed isn't really relevant if we talk about the masses, Reddit accounts are for sale quite cheap, HN as well, X too and so-on, it's literally just a matter of means/methodology. If I want today to do 1000 random posts talking about a certain thing, I could.
replymy individual feed does matter because it shows that it is possible to curate something without bots which is obviously what XAI would do
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