The crypto community is reporting a sharp decline in the number of bots responding to their posts following Elon Musk’s most recent attack on crypto spam bots on Twitter.
The CEO of Twitter hinted that “bots are in for a surprise tomorrow” in a post on December 11. Later, the CEO added that the platform will be blocking the IP addresses of “known bad actors” after identifying a small group of individuals responsible for a large number of bot/troll accounts.
Elon Musk guarantees to shut down the scammers
He continued by saying that even though con artists might use other strategies to get around the IP address block, Twitter will “shut them down as soon as they show up.”
Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus’ pseudonym Shibetoshi Nakamoto wrote to Musk on December 11: “I made a test post and instead of seeing 50 bot replies I only saw one much progress, very hype.”
Other users went to test Elon Musk’s most recent adjustments. An investor and bitcoin analyst named PlanB published a chart to track the number of automated responses. As of the time of writing, no comments from bots had appeared.
While Twitter “seems to be marginally better to use lately,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin added, he couldn’t tell if there had been a decrease in bots because of Musk. Some claim that the bot responses still appear on posts, but the platform quickly deletes them.
After taking over as CEO of Twitter in October, Musk saw the elimination of Twitter spam and scam bots as one of his top priorities.
Musk also made a passing mention in his most recent post that the company plans to sue Twitter scammers in the future, but he provided no further information.
MicroStrategy founder Micahel Saylor responded to Musk, questioning what percentage of toxic behavior on Twitter is driven by bots rather than healthy people. Elon Musk responded:
That’s my guess: small number of humans with large bot/troll armies. We are shutting down IP addresses of known bad actors today. Should have been done long ago.