Twitter continues to experience terrible spam bot issues (fake accounts)

Maybe Elon Musk really shouldn’t put his money down on Twitter. I know that I wouldn’t, given the sheer amount of spam/bots that can be found within the social platform. It’s kind of disgusting how easy it is to run into it all. Not only that, but Twitter’s own app recommends tweets from these bots daily for some users (even though you aren’t following the related fake accounts/users).

After numerous stories about this, some coming from within our own building, a few of us set out to determine how easy it really was to run into it all. Honestly, many of us had already been receiving recommendations through the app for random spam accounts. However, we wanted to know what exactly triggered them.

The answer? It’s all about how your account is themed and associated with other accounts and categories. Simply adding certain keywords to your username or bio is enough to set this off. We found that these bots especially like users who are interested in “gaming” or “anime” as you can see in the main header image above.

We wound up patiently testing this out for a number of months. Each of the days, we received multiple tweets from the app from some of these accounts. It felt that the more you swiped them away, the more they came back twice-fold. Almost always, fake accounts led by a female’s image both in the user image as well as the tweet. Usually trying to get the user’s attention with seductive messages.

The issue with this? It’s flooding out all of the content that we really want to see recommended to us. Content that is relevant or at least half-interest. However, the worst issue we have with it all is that these topics of interest (video games, anime, etc) are, in many cases, related to younger users (kids/teenagers). All of which being poked and prodded by fake Twitter accounts claiming to want to be their “anime girlfriend” or “gamer wife”–and almost always containing inappropriate words related to various acts or certain sections of the female body, including showing these portions of the body openly or through wet clothing, within the images.

I choose brown/yellow for the color variations in the above header image because the whole thing reminded me of a giant pile of crap. Rotten, runny, smelly, crap! Which is how I feel about Twitter as of late. Many of us, in fact. What’s the fun when you are swiping through a dozen or more fake tweets within your announcements screen. Which also account for likely half of the twitter announcements/recommendations for that day. Unless you keep swiping them away, which only results in more.

So after all this time, the only verdict was that everyone that has brought this up in recent months was absolutely right. Twitter is plagued with fake accounts (bots/spam) and possibly getting worse. I really do wonder what number represents all of these fake accounts within the total global user accounts that Twitter has. I would imagine that it is pretty high.

It seems that these accounts do eventually get deleted. Likely once enough users have reported them. Users who are complaining about the content being delivered to them. Taking the time out of their day to point each and every individual picture, tweet, or account out to Twitter. Because Twitter’s own algorithms obviously aren’t doing a thing to prevent any of it.

Of course, this may also be making it worse. We ourselves spent a good amount of time reporting various tweets. However, at times, it felt like it was only increasing the number of recommended tweets we were getting. Maybe because you have to click on the tweet to open it in order to report it. Thus if you keep clicking on them, maybe Twitter’s system thinks you love them. Thus continues to recommend even more. Just a theory.

So yes, Elon should run from the deal to buy Twitter. The deal completely reeks of false information from the bottom to the top. Nothing good can come from that.