X is warning users that they may see a drop in their follower count as the company tries to clean up the network from some spammers and bots on a large scale. Through an announcement posted by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will launch a “important, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules on platform manipulation and spam.
Traffic comes shortly after X announced the date two new leaders to its security team: Kylie McRoberts, an existing X employee who is now Head of Security, and Yale Cohen, formerly of Publicis Media, who joined as Head of Brand Safety and Advertiser Solutions.
Spam was an area Elon Musk was eager to tackle at X, telling employees in November 2022 that he aimed to make combating spam a priority going forward.
However, spam proved more difficult to combat than he had hoped, especially after widespread job cuts left Twitter’s Trust & Safety team understaffed, while the Head of Safety role remained vacant for 10 months after the previous departures of Ella Irwin and Yoel. Roth under Musk.
Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it harder to reign in spam.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Musk’s plan to require users to pay for verification did not appear to have stopped spammers from joining the platform. It found that some bots with verified blue checks were replying to posts on X with a variation of the phrase, “Sorry, I can’t reply as it’s against the OpenAI use case policy” – an indication that they were not humans, but bots.
Additionally, a recent New York Intelligencer report detailing the rise of spam promoting adult content to users by posting explicit replies that showed links in their bio for users to follow.
The scale of spam on the network was one of the sticking points for Musk when he initially tried to back out of the $44 billion Twitter deal, saying the company wasn’t being honest about the number of bots. But these days, Musk is advertising how X sees record trafficwithout specifying whether its own numbers include bots and spam.
According to the announcement of the X Safety team, the company will be “casting a wide net” in its effort to remove spam and bots from the platform, which may lead to a decrease in the number of followers. This is par for the course for bot scans on its platform.
X also shared a link to a form where users inadvertently affected by the bot scan could file an appeal.
