Ever since Tesla’s Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter and tried to get information on the number of bots on the social media platform, Twitter bots have been infecting tens of thousands of posts day after day. In the cryptocurrency industry, bots are very prevalent and every time a popular cryptocurrency account posts, the thread is filled with legions of bots trying to scam people. Despite people regularly reporting bots and openly complaining about the problem, Twitter has done very little to address the issue.
Binance-Backed Musk Bot Allegations – ‘Twitter Please, I See Enough of My Boss’
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR ) has a problem with fake accounts, or bots, that are quite prevalent in the crypto ecosystem and other industries such as technology, finance and politics. While bots and fake accounts have been known to exist for quite some time, when Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter this year, his team asked for numbers about the amount of spam accounts using the social media app. When Musk decided to terminate the deal with Twitter, his lawyer explained that the Tesla executive needed more information needed to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on the Twitter platform.”
Musk’s lawyer added:
Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that seem unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to have complied by giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.
In late August, a judge in the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered Twitter to provide Musk and his team with additional data. Additionally, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also launched an investigation into spam accounts using the social media app. On September 5, Musk tweeted about the new movie “Rings of Power” and after his comment, he said, “And 90% of my comments are bots.” Musk shared a picture of spam accounts claiming to be Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, aka “CZ”.
Binance’s official Twitter account complained to the social media company on Musk’s topic and pointed out: “Twitter, please, I already see enough of my boss. Can you help me so I don’t have to see it 99 times every 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”. The spelling of CZ’s name with the term Binance in different variations will produce dozens of CZ bots that are tweeting people every day.
Legions of CZ Twitter Bots
Currently, the legions of CZ bots that exist can be found spamming almost every major crypto account that publishes a tweet. For example, Twitter account for Bitcoin.com News has 2.6 million followers, and every time that the account posts a new article, spam accounts appear in large numbers and many of them are fake CZ accounts. A large number of other fake accounts use immutable token (NFT) images for their profile pictures and post spam comments with links and further say:Why is no one talking about this?“People also have a fake reply on the account for the comment, to reinforce the scam. “This is crazy dude,” says one person in response to a YouTube scam video link.
The same spam accounts and CZ bots can be found in tweets from almost every popular Twitter account, including Table with ornaments, Cointelegraph, bloc, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Bitfinex, Blockchain.com, and more. In addition to CZ, since the beginning of the promotion of Ethereum Merge, Twitter has been filled with many Vitalik Buterin Twitter bots. The worst is the fact that some of these accounts have blue tick verifications. Even Buterin openly ridiculed one of the prolific comments that crypto-bot scammers like to say in twitter threads: “But why is everyone keeping FQTP quiet about this?” After the comment, Buterin ‘Rickrolled’ the thread with Rick Astley’s official music video “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
Twitter’s reporting process is fragmented into a bunch of sections, but it does offer the ability to report an account that’s accused of “[Spamming or] posting malicious links, misuse of hashtags, fake engagement, repeated 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 fraudulent or misleading links that lead to scams, Twitter once again asks you to confirm the report. “It looks like you’d like to report platform manipulation and spam,” Twitter’s reporting process asks.
Typically, after reporting dozens of these types of spam accounts, bots still exist in large numbers and often, Twitter will not respond to the report. From time to time, Twitter will say that it detected that the account was suspected of spamming and will respond to the report. Usually, Twitter simply hides the spam account from the person who reported it and the fake account is still seen by the general public.
Crypto Influencer Pomp Addresses Twitter Email Account Issue, Social Media Company’s Head of Information Security Asked About Spam Issue
Last week, the popular Twitter account known as “Pomp,” operated by crypto investor Anthony Pompliano, he complained regarding the situation ed. “I have manually blocked hundreds of Twitter bots today,” Pompliano has written on September 12. “This happens every day. How in the world could a $32 billion company not solve this problem? I have blocked over 30 bots that replied to the original tweets in the first 4 minutes. Unreal,” added the crypto-indicator.
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, CISO of Twitter’s information security, privacy engineering and IT teams was asked about the problem on August 18. “Are you planning to assemble a team to deal with spam?” person asked Kissner. “It’s out of control, [especially] in the bitcoin/crypto realm. check any bitcoiner with [a] good follower.” Kissner answered the question and said: “Trust and Health and Safety are different teams. We work with them, but different orgs.” The person responded to Kissner’s statement and noted:
I thought spam prevention would fall under information security. My mistake then.
What do you think about spammy crypto accounts and CZ bots on Twitter? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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