Elon Musk's latest achievement in his Twitter fight against crypto spam bots appears to have had a result, with the crypto community reporting a significant decrease in the number of bots replying to their tweets.
"A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter," Musk said in a TED Talk in Vancouver before his successful takeover in October. "They make the product much worse. If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we'd have 100 billion Dogecoin."
The Twitter CEO hinted in a Dec. 11 post that "bots are in for a surprise tomorrow," and subsequently added that they've discovered a small number of persons behind a high number of bot/troll accounts, and the site will be locking down IP addresses of "known bad actors."
He went on to say that while scammers may try various tactics to get over the IP address limitation, Twitter will be "shutting them down as soon as they show up."
Meanwhile, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that "Twitter *seems* to be marginally better to use lately," though he couldn't tell if this was due to Musk.
"I made a test post and instead of seeing 50 bot replies I only saw one much progress, very hype," Shibetoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Billy Markus, co-creator of meme coin Dogecoin, told Musk in a Dec. 11 post.
Other users went to test Musk's latest changes as well. PlanB, a Bitcoin analyst and investor, created a chart to predict how many bots would respond. At the time of writing, no responses from bots have shown up in the comments.
Some users have reported that bot responses continue to appear on posts, but are quickly removed by the platform.
Twitter spam and scam bots have been a scourge on the platform, and Musk identified them as one of his top priorities after taking over the company in October.
Musk also suggested in his latest tweet that the platform will seek legal action against scammers on Twitter in the future, but provided no other information.
"Twitter will also be moving to prosecute scammers anywhere on Earth," he said.
Reactions to Musk's ownership of the major social networking platform remain varied. Many praised the move as a step forward for free speech, while others cited Musk's own seemingly immature behavior on Twitter and his enormous wealth.
