Company X is warning users that their follower count may decrease as they attempt to broadly remove some spammers and bots from their network. According to an announcement released by the X Safety Account, the company will begin the following actions on Thursday. “Meaningful and proactive initiatives” To remove accounts that violate X's rules regarding platform manipulation and spam.
Today, we are launching a significant and proactive effort to remove accounts that violate our rules against platform manipulation and spam. While we aim to be accurate in the accounts we remove, we cast a wide net to ensure X is safe and free of bots. As…
— Safety (@Safety) April 4, 2024
movement occurs immediately after X announced the appointment Two new leaders on the safety team are Kylie McRoberts, an existing X employee who is now director of safety, and Yale Cohen, formerly of Publicis Media, brand safety and advertiser solutions. joined as the person in charge.
Spam is an area that Elon Musk has been eager to work on at Company X, telling employees in November 2022 that he aims to make fighting spam a priority going forward.
But combating spam has proven to be more difficult than he expected, especially after large-scale layoffs left Twitter's trust and safety team understaffed and the early retirements of Ella Irwin and Yoel. , the role of safety officer remained vacant for 10 months. Ross during Musk's tenure.
Advances in AI have also made it harder to control spam.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Musk's plan to require users to pay for Verification appeared to have failed to deter spammers from joining the platform. A number of bots with a blue check for “Verified” were replying to his X post with variations of the phrase “Sorry, we can't answer because it violates OpenAI's use case policy.” It turns out. It's a bot, not a human.
Additionally, a recent report by the New York Intelligencer details the rise in spam pushing adult content to users by posting explicit replies with links in their profiles for them to follow.
The scale of spam on the network was one of the sticking points for Mr. Musk when he first tried to cancel the $44 billion Twitter contract, accusing the company of not being honest about the number of bots it had. Ta.But recently, masks Promote how X is seeing record trafficHe declined to say whether his numbers included bots or spam.
According to an announcement from the X Safety Team, the company: “Cast a wide net” Your follower count may decrease as we attempt to remove spam and bots from our platform. This is par for the course in bot mopping up on the platform.
X also shared a link to a form where users who were inadvertently affected by the bot sweep can file a complaint.