It’s the same old story on X (the app formerly known as Twitter and currently an AI fever dream): Elon Musk claims the bots are gone, but you still wake up to notifications from "Hot Singles" and crypto scammers. However, Nikita Bier, the Head of Product, thinks they’ve finally made progress. On April 9, he shared that X is now banning about 208 bots every minute, that adds up to 300,000 accounts a day, which sounds like a huge number, but in our world, where the internet is drowning in spam, it still feels like a drop in the bucket.
Why Should We Care? (Spoiler Alert: We Probably Do Not)
Nikita Bier has been warning his followers about "The Dead Internet Theory" for quite a while now. According to this theory, as Artificial Intelligence becomes ever more advanced, bots start to sound as human as your aunt on Facebook. This daily 300,000-bot execution is the result of X finally moving "spam mitigation" to the top of its to-do list. Instead of just talking about it, the engineering team is actually hunting down the code-driven pests that have been cluttering up our feeds, which means that they finally bought some Raid, as the house is infested with termites.
A Pinch of Realism to Wash It All Down
Despite the big talk, outside observers aren't exactly throwing a parade. Studies from places like the University of Queensland have pointed out that since the 80% staff haircut Musk gave the company, moderation has become a game of “thoughts and prayers.” When you get rid of all your best workers because you cannot stand them, you cannot expect anything else.
However, this purge does not come at random. Since the world experiences global conflicts and elections, X is under serious pressure from various states. They need a guarantee that it will not become yet another platform for state-sponsored troll factories and ChatGPT to promote rage bait. If Bier's team succeeds in maintaining a steady flow of about 208 deletions per minute, it is likely that the site will recover soon. If not, we will continue receiving endless advertisements for MoonCoin.
Can AI Save Us From Itself?
This is one of those situations that could only happen on the internet. The use of advanced technologies, such as AI to fight against other AI and our concept of a "global town square" become real; the irony is that the platform seems to resemble a post-apocalyptic ghost town. Let's hope that this purge will be sufficient enough and will work; otherwise, we are destined to come back to the same conversation after three months complaining about how Gary got 400 brothers.
