░H░I░B░E░S░T░I░E░

Walden Green on X's problem with porn bots.

X, née Twitter, has a “bot problem.” In January, an AI called 5th Column analyzed 1.269 million accounts and pegged the number of bot accounts at around 64% of Monetizable Daily Active Users (or mDAUs). From there, the numbers only go up. During the 2024 Super Bowl, the site publicly reported engagements in the billions and posts in the tens of millions, but the cybersecurity firm CHEQ says almost 76% of that engagement was fake.

Last year, Elon Musk suggested charging all X accounts a small monthly fee, but nobody was particularly into that. Now bot purges have become de rigueur; we had our last one mere days ago, and the one before that (selfishly) lost me about 100 of my own carefully cultivated followers. Most everyone, it appears, sees X’s lowliest residents as a a mess that either needs to be cleaned up or weeded out.

Except who has stopped to ask if this is a problem that needs to be solved? Nobody has stood up to give the bots a voice, to make a case for their sticking around.

Anecdotally, the prevalence of bots is obvious because their patterns have become rote to the point of easy memeification. There are the classic “check our pinned” reply guys, who like to form little clusters of users by tagging twenty or so handles seemingly at random. These are typically crypto bots, with some data farming thrown in there. But the ones who’ve really captivated my corner of the internet are the cam site porn bots.

At this point their rhythms are familiar. First, they’ll like one of your tweets, and it can be any tweet, the older and more arbitrary, the better. In a report from ABC News Australia, bot networks expert Dr. Timothy Graham estimates that “one in 10 likes are from a porn bot.” Then there’s the follow, which X probably won’t notify you about anymore the way it does when a real person follows you. In a way I almost miss the notifs; after all, engagement is engagement is engagement. The luckiest among us will get a comment, which will be some permutation of the porn bots’ signature clarion call: ░M░Y░ ░P░U░S░S░Y░ ░I░N░ ░B░I░O░.

ICYMI

SCENT ACCESS MEMORY