Since Tesla’s Elon Musk attempted to purchase Twitter and tried to get information on the number of bots on the social media platform, Twitter bots have infested tens of thousands of posts day after day. Bots are very widespread in cryptocurrency. Any time that a prominent crypto account posts, the thread will be infested with thousands of bots looking to defraud people. Twitter is doing little to remedy the issue despite people complaining and reporting bots on a regular basis.
Musk’s Bot Accusations Backed by Binance — ‘Twitter, Please, I See Enough of My Boss Already’
Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) is having a problem dealing with bots or fake accounts. These are very prevalent in other industries, such as finance, politics, and technology. Bots and fake account exist since a long time. However, Elon Musk’s team sought numbers regarding the number of spam accounts that were using Twitter when he tried to acquire it this year. When Musk decided to terminate the deal with Twitter, his lawyer explained that the Tesla executive needed more information necessary to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.”
Musk’s attorney added:
Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.
A judge from the Delaware Court of Chancery directed Twitter to give Musk and his colleagues additional information at the end of August. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission started an investigation into spam accounts that were using social media. On September 5, Musk tweeted about the new “Rings of Power” film and after his commentary, he said: “And 90% of my comments are bots.” Musk shared a picture of spam accounts pretending to be Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, otherwise known as “CZ.”
The official Binance account on Twitter complained to the social media company in Musk’s thread and stressed: “Twitter, please, I see enough of my boss already. Can you help so I don’t have to see him 99x more each day?” The account name “CZ Binance” is a very popular spam account name right now, and a simple search will immediately produce 16 accounts pretending to be ”CZ Binance.” Spelling CZ’s name with the term Binance in different variationsThere will be dozens of CZ Bots spamming users every day on Twitter.
Twitter Bots Legions of CZ
CZ bots can currently be seen spamming almost every major cryptocurrency account that posts a tweet. Take, for example, Twitter accountFor Bitcoin.com News, there are 2.6 million people following it. account tweets out a new articleThere are many spam accounts, and some of these accounts may be fake CZ accounts. A great number of other phony accounts use non-fungible token (NFT) images for their profile pictures and spam out comments with links and further say: “Why isn’t anyone talking about this?” The people also have a phony account reply to the comment, in order to bolster the scam. “This is crazy dude,” one person says in response to a scam Youtube video link.
Nearly every Twitter account has the same spam bots and CZ robots. Coindesk, Cointelegraph, The Block, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Bitfinex, Blockchain.comYou can find more information here. In addition to CZ, since the start of Ethereum’s Merge hype, Twitter has been littered with lots of Vitalik Buterin copy-cat Twitter bots. What’s worse is the fact that some of these accountsHave blue check mark verifications Buterin even openly mocked one of the prolific comments crypto bot scammers like to say in Twitter threads: “But why is everybodyy silentFQTP on thiss???” After the comment, Buterin ‘Rickrolled’ the thread with Rick Astley’s official music video “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
The reporting process on Twitter is fragmented into a myriad of sections, but it does offer the ability to report an account that is accused of “[Spamming or] posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, retweets, or direct messages.” After checking this part of Twitter’s complaint process, the account can be accused of “posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links.” After notifying Twitter that the account is posting misleading or deceptive links that lead to scams, Twitter asks one more time for you to confirm the report. “It sounds like you want to make a report for platform manipulation and spam,” Twitter’s reporting process asks.
After reporting numerous spam accounts, most bots will still be present and Twitter won’t respond to reports. Twitter might occasionally reply to reports that the account has been spammed. Twitter will usually hide the spam account from those who report it. However, the fake account can still be seen by the public.
Crypto Influencer Pomp Addresses Twitter’s Spam Account Problem, Social Media Company’s Head of Information Security Questioned About Spam Issue
This past week, the popular Twitter account known as “Pomp,” operated by the crypto investor Anthony Pompliano, complainedInformation about bots “I have manually blocked hundreds of Twitter bots today,” Pompliano wroteOn September 12, “This happens every day. This problem is solved every day by a company worth $32 billion. In the 4 minute period that followed the initial tweet, I blocked 30 or more bots. Unreal,” the crypto influencer added.
Twitter, the company’s employees, and the support team have been asked about the bot and spam account issue for quite some time. Lea Kissner, the CISO of Twitter’s information security, privacy engineering, and IT teams was asked about the problem on August 18. “Do you plan to assemble a team to deal with spam?” the person asked Kissner. “It’s out of control, [especially]Bitcoin/crypto sphere. Check out any Bitcoiner [a] decent following.” Kissner replied to the question and said: “Trust and Safety and Health are different teams. We work with them, but different org.” The person responded to Kissner’s statement and remarked:
My mistake. I assumed spam prevention was part of information security. I made a mistake.
How do you feel about crypto spam accounts on Twitter and CZ bots? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.
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