(PM.) On Thursday, Elon Musk announced that a system-wide purge of bots and trolls had kicked off on X.
He vowed to track down those overseeing the spam accounts and dealing with them appropriately.
System purge of bots & trolls underway.
Please reply to me or @XEng if legitimate accounts are suspended.
X Corp will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 4, 2024
“System purge of bots & trolls underway,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Please reply to me or [X Engineering] if legitimate accounts are suspended.”
“X Corp,” he added, “will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them.”
Ridding the platform of bots has long been on Musk’s agenda. Upon taking ownership he vowed to get it done, but thus far the problem has persisted. Analysis conducted by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology last year found that spam accounts were still present as ever.
The researchers tracked a number of bot accounts and discovered that they remained active longer than expected, suggesting that “whatever method [X] is using [to crack down on such accounts] is poor.”
