The rise of cryptocurrencies have spelled a troubling time for Twitter users interested in the space as bots have all but invaded the platform to post fake giveaways of several coins, especially Ethereum (ETH).
More recently, the bots started imitating the personas of prominent people. Although the people that they mimic are mostly those operating in the space, that hasn’t stopped individuals like Elon Musk from having a litany of copycat accounts, all claiming to give away enormous amounts of ETH.
Twitter took notice of this and started employing the tactic of blocking out every single user who uses the Elon Musk name. This includes anyone who may coincidentally bear the same name in real life.
“As part of our continuing efforts to combat spam and malicious activity on our service, we’re testing new measures to challenge accounts that use terms commonly associated with spam campaigns. We are continually refining these detections based on changes in spammy activity,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge.
The Twitter scam bot situation got so bad in recent months that on July 17, several prominent members of the cryptocurrency community, including the CEO of Binance and the Icelandic Blockchain Foundation, signed an open letter calling for the social network to take action.
They pointed out the hypocrisy of the platform in banning advertising activities related to cryptocurrencies on it, while at the same time allowing the bots to run rampant.
“Twitter’s public stance on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies is inconsistent and ambiguous. At a time when companies and individuals, even not-for-profits intent on educating individuals, are barred from advertising to interested participants via Twitter, it is not just hypocritical, but shameful that the company allows these spam bots and false accounts to exist and rampantly scam users, while spreading misinformation,” the letter said.
Users who get their Twitter account blocked aren’t banned from the service entirely. All they have to do to recover their accounts is submit to an anti-bot challenge and verify their phone numbers on the platform.
We tested this ourselves and found that Twitter blocked an account we modified to use Elon Musk’s name. It’s possible that the platform may start blocking people using the names of others that have been used in these spam campaigns.
The only concern now is that these scammers will start using clever tactics to closely copy the names of individuals. For example, they could start inserting invisible characters or even replace some of the letters in the name with others that look similar, or with letters from the cyrillic alphabet.
An uppercase “i” looks much like a lowercase “L”, while the cyrillic character for “a” is the same as the latin one. But even these tactics could be thwarted if Twitter applies the correct filters.
For now, it’s just a matter of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
