At NYMag, John Hermann takes a deep dive into the moist world of ░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░ spambots on Twitter, which the company has not and for comical reasons will not deal with. It starts with an amusing tour through Elon Musk's superficial promises to do something about the bots and then gets into the nitty-gritty of why it isn't happening.
we're probably seeing a deceptively small cluster of affiliate marketers seizing on X's diminished defenses with industry-standard techniques. … From the spammers' perspective, X is just one channel of many, a historically low-return environment that suddenly became a bit friendlier to what they do. Unlike on most of its peers, where users are isolated in groups or by recommendation algorithms, a modest uptick in spam and bot traffic can be quite visible. Bots clearly bother Musk, just not as much as some of the things that might stop them: employing more people, including contract workers from outsourcing companies like the one used by his PIB antagonists, and embracing industry best practices around content moderation, which he recently characterized as a "propaganda word for censorship."
"Why not just block the string?" is a good question, just like "why not just ignore it when a random foreign country demands censorship?" Because that would leave money on the table, dumbass.
