Twitter/X has a pr0nbot problem and Elon Musk knows how to fix it — or at least he hopes he does. The situation in recent weeks has gotten totally out of control. What used to be AI-generated images of scantily clad women (of almost impossible proportions) clogging your timeline with random Likes and random messages have escalated to sexually explicit AI-generated images.
Before we get to Musk's plan for eliminating the pr0nbots it would be nice to see Musk admit that Twitter/X still has several problems, ones I'd hoped Musk and his lean team of coders and managers would have fixed by now, but, alas.
Musk himself admitted last year that Twitter/X needs a "complete rewrite" after a major outage affecting millions of users. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said at the time. The top-to-bottom rewrite does not seem to have happened yet.
Twitter/X's most serious problem is the censorship, for lack of a better word, that was baked into the social media platform's computer code during the pre-Musk days. Based on a lot of personal experience since I became active again on Twitter/X two years ago, the problem has been ameliorated somewhat but not eliminated.
Shortly after Musk bought the company in 2020, a series of posts called the Twitter Files revealed how the company's tools to combat spam and financial fraud were quickly adapted to suppress speech, genuine news stories like Hunter Biden's laptop from Hell, and even users or individual tweets that lefties didn't like.
There were also algorithms that would automatically stifle the reach of conservative users. My cleverest tweets used to be seen by tens of thousands of users, easy. By the time I quit using Twitter in disgust in 2018, even my best stuff was seen by dozens. Maybe.
Things have gotten better since my friend Stephen Kruiser convinced me to get back on board in 2022, but things aren't yet as free-speech friendly as they were during Twitter's 2007-2015 heyday.
And now there are the pr0nbots that have become such a problem that I don't want my sons looking over my shoulder when I'm online, or they might think Dad is into some deeply weird stuff.
To combat the bots, Musk now says the platform will charge new users a "small fee," calling it "the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots." Twitter/X launched a pilot version last October in New Zealand and the Philippines, requiring new accounts to pay a $1 annual fee to post, like, reply. and more. Previously, Musk promised, "We will defeat the spam bots or die trying."
I'd take it one step further since a $1 annual fee might not be big enough to dissuade a profitable spammer, and certainly not enough to deter a George Soros-type and their armies of lefty troll accounts. What Musk needs to do is, except for established corporate accounts, allow only a small number of Twitter/X handles on a single credit card number.
I've said for years that the only way to fix what ails social media is to charge for it. An ideal platform would be one that charged enough to make a profit without engaging in the near-criminal data-harvesting that Facebook, TikTok, and so many others do. But charging a buck a year to get rid of the pr0nbots is a good start.
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