Screenshot / YouTube, SXSW, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

Some X users have consistently complained about the amount of spam and porn bots operating on the platform.

Zuby, a popular account on X, said on Thursday, “X needs to fix the spam and p0rn bot problem. It's completely out of hand.” 

Elon Musk responded to the post, signaling that him and his team are aware of the issue, and that a “major purge is about to happen.”

Musk later made a separate post that stated, “System purge of bots & trolls underway.”

“Please reply to me or @XEng if legitimate accounts are suspended,” he continued. “X Corp will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them.”

The seemingly growing number of spam and porn bots on X has been a topic of conversation for years, stemming far before Musk’s take over of the platform.

The New York Post reported back in August of 2023 that a study found over 1,000 AI bots on X stealing selfies to create fake accounts.

A student-teacher team at the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University conducted the research, uncovering a network of fake accounts on X known as the “Fox8” botnet. 

The findings highlighted that botnet utilizes ChatGPT to generate content aimed at promoting suspicious websites and spreading harmful content.

Musk announced his plans to combat spam and porn bots later in 2023, arguing that implementing $1 annual subscriptions would curb the fake accounts.

Though this idea never manifested into fruition, Musk’s “Not a Bot” program was said to be an addition to X’s premium program that offers paid subscriptions of $8 a month.

The social media platform’s help center also has addressed the influx of spam accounts, telling users they may not “use X's services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses on X.”

Following Zuby’s post on Thursday, other users chimed in to voice their frustrations with bot accounts, and specifically the widespread surge of Only Fans links.

“X needs to ban alllllll porn and OF links,” wrote one user.

“How quickly we went from pronouns in bio to nudes in bio,” one said.

“Remember before musk though? Was way worse… especially with the fake accounts posting crypto scams,” lamented another.

Posting frequently increases the likelihood of bot accounts being seen by more legitimate users, thus raising the probability that a human might click on a fraudulent URL, The Post outlines.

To mimic human behavior, fake accounts not only appropriate photos from real users but also engage in frequent interactions such as retweets and replies.

In the case of Fox8 botnet findings, these types of accounts boast profile descriptions and even maintain statistics such as an average of 74 followers, 140 friends, and 149.6 tweets.

X users may argue that they can spot a counterfeit account from miles away, but some accounts are more convincing than most realize. Especially when a real person’s likeness and imagery has been duplicated.

X has said that it will prohibit behavior from accounts that include commercially-motivated spam, inauthentic engagements, coordinated activity, coordinated harmful activity that encourages or promotes behavior which violates its rules.

It is also on the lookout for accounts that are “leveraging X's open source code to circumvent remediations or platform defenses.”