Twitter’s problem with bad bots seems to be getting worse, despite promises made by owner Elon Musk when he bought the platform to tackle the problem.
Security Researcher @MalwareHunterTeam flag is up Throughout the last week, the issue tweeted screenshots of a number of porn bots that began following their accounts and liking various posts.
“Oh my god @elonmusk? Consecutive likes from 9 porn bot accounts…I think it’s a record for this account. But all the bot issues were fixed months ago, right?” they said in one post.
For more on Twitter’s security issues, see Twitter executives continue to resign as Blue Program creates new cyber risks.
Other people on the site have the same problem.Scholar Mark Owen Jones tweeted He said he had been spammed by more than 2,000 fake accounts after a tweet criticizing Twitter’s removal of access to academic APIs.
Another blue check user, former racing driver Igor Shushko, posted several times About the bot accounts that have been following him for the last few days.
Musk famously declared last year, “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will beat spambots or fight them to death.”
But his efforts to do so have been patchy, and weren’t helped by the layoff of more than half of Twitter’s employees.
In fact, Twitter seems to be making things worse by shutting out real users.some have screenshot posted “This request appears to be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we are unable to complete this action at this time. Please try again later.”
Also impacting the user experience is Musk trying to deal with another type of bot that swarms the site: bots that AI companies use to “scrape” data to feed their models. is an attempt.
Over the weekend, Musk announced that he would be rate limiting accounts that read posts to mitigate “data scraping and system manipulation.”
