The Twitter/X Bots Are Mutating in a Scary Way

What this new abomination looks like and could mean

FML

While we all knew that Elon Musk overpaying for Twitter by about $30 Billion was good evidence that the cripplingly egotistical taintlord was going to impose his sick will on it in spades, I may have underestimated just how sideways it would go this quickly.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the platform’s rapid descent into chaos is the types of Spambots that have dominated at certain times.

We’ve all seen the various and sundry Rosy porn accounts (with its myriad variations) often popping up in a serious conversation thread (say, the death of a famous person) to wonder aloud if you’d like to pay good money to see nude photos on the internet.

Then there’s the Crypto-Bots (no doubt coked up on A.I.) that emerge in response to a Longhorns Football discussion with a deep and detailed position paper on Dogecoin without even a glimmer of irony. I guess one has to respect the hustle.

An offshoot of the Rosy bots are the now ubiquitous “Link in Bio” posts with their unique shaded command font, which has already been parodied to death, sometimes with amusing results.

But, even as annoying as they have been, one unifying feature of the spambots on Twitter/X has been how fucking obvious they are. Nobody is getting fooled, or at least shouldn’t be. Another is that they’re clearly based on a profit model, where a good or service is the ultimate goal.

So that underscores what’s so troubling about the latest scourge of that troubled platform: the Trying Really Hard to Look Real New Follower who, at least on the surface, isn’t hocking anything.

I’ve had HUNDREDS of these pop us new Followers in the last week, and if I didn’t have the habit of scrutinizing followers to try and weed out the bots, I may never have even noticed.

So, let’s break this scourge down.

They all have a profile picture, ostensibly real name, and very specific job listed. I’ll use the esteemed “Michael Hunt” as an example (setting aside the tempting double entendre his name likely unwittingly offers).

Okay, maybe it’s rare to see a New Mexico Neurosurgeon joining Twitter/X in March of 2024, but nothing jumps off the page about this if you were to casually glance at it without peeking at tells like follower count (it’s almost always zero).

Another commonality of these is who they follow. It’s ALWAYS Elon Musk and a few others. Not that following Musk is super unusual, but literally every one of these accounts does.

Back to Michael:

But where it gets even weirder and, I submit, more sinister is that each of them typically has one Retweet and one only (for now). And it is, without exception, Elon Musk saying something typically shitty.

From bad jokes, to lie-fueled tropes about immigration, to stroking Tucker Carlson’s Putin-loving wand, it’s reliably Right Wing propaganda. To me, this is chilling, especially with an existentialist election looming.

From bad jokes, to lie-fueled tropes about immigration, to stroking Tucker Carlson’s Putin-loving wand, it’s reliably Right Wing propaganda. To me, this is chilling, especially with an existentialist election looming. I know this general concept is hardly new on Twitter/X, but it has never been left unchecked before.

And these new bots are invariably pushing right wing talking points. Not almost always, or usually, or sometimes. Always. This is what leads me to my hypothesis that this is very possibly Beta testing for something decidedly bad.

[H]aving an echo chamber like Twitter/X and its millions of users in place, then adding countless new, manufactured, and ideologically focused voices that appear not as obvious bots (as had long been a problem on Twitter) but as legitimate users has the potential to be incredibly dangerous.

In an evolving society where social media is so dominant in the discourse and everyone feels entitled to their own reality, having an echo chamber like Twitter/X and its millions of users in place, then adding countless new, manufactured, and ideologically focused voices that appear not as obvious bots (as had long been a problem on Twitter) but as legitimate users has the potential to be incredibly dangerous.

This is especially true when election denial has becoming mainstream enough to give us the current leader for President in the 2024 election.

Seem legit.

I’m not sure what can be done about this new version of e-scavengers, but I humbly suggest that all y’all take time every so often to sift through your new followers and block every single one of these fuckstumps. Twitter/X may be going to hell, but let’s at least make it a bit tougher on the demons taking it there.