Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has been controversial for a lot of reasons. While Musk received immense backlash for his mass layoffs and bringing back previously banned accounts, he was lauded for his latest move. This particularly came from the crypto community.
The entire globe has witnessed Musk’s involuntary association with bots. Crypto scam bots have repeatedly used the world’s richest man to dupe people. Along with upholding freedom of speech, Musk wanted to purchase Twitter to address concerns regarding these bots. It looks like his plan was finally coming to fruition.
Earlier today, an array of Twitter users revealed that there was a downfall in the number of scam bots. Over the weekend, Musk shared a tweet announcing that “bots are in for a surprise tomorrow.” It was brought to light that a small group of people is behind a plethora of bot accounts on Twitter. Therefore, the surprise was the reduction of bots as Twitter decided to shut down the IP addresses associated with the aforementioned group. He tweeted,
“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.”
While Twitter is a free platform, the possibility of the recurrence of these bots is feared. However, replying to Dogecoin’s co-founder Billy Markus, Musk tweeted,
As seen in the above tweet, Musk affirmed that he would “prosecute scammers anywhere on Earth.”
Has Twitter become better to use?
Like Billy Markus, an array of Twitter accounts went on to check if the bots were gone. Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin was also asked if the bots were officially kicked out of Twitter. Replying to the same, Buterin said,
“I… honestly can’t tell. Twitter seems to be marginally better to use lately, but no idea how to separate apart stuff Elon did vs crypto-winter vs my brain imagining changes that aren’t actually there.”
While there has been a drastic drop in the number of bots, they aren’t entirely gone. YouTube continues to harbor several crypto scammers. Following Twitter’s latest move, the community was urging Musk to purchase YouTube and get rid of scammers there as well.