Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam

Forget Mars colonies and self-driving cars. Elon Musk's greatest challenge yet? Defeating Twitter's relentless pussy in bio' spam army. And let's just say, it's not going well.

It has really been quite incredible to watch Elon rediscover some of the basics of trust & safety best practices (though while consistently messing it up) as ExTwitter just gets worse and worse. Before he had even taken over Twitter, he insisted he had two priorities: stopping spam and restoring free speech. Of course, some of us pointed out that those two things were in conflict.

Spam fighting is a core part of trust & safety, but Elon insisted that he knew better, fired basically everyone with any knowledge on the subject, and then repeatedly suggested that he had figured out how to solve it, only to see spam get worse and worse on ExTwitter, to the point that users are getting really frustrated.

Most recently, the spam has been in the form of posts with the following, or some variation on this: MYPUSSYINBIO." It's been so unavoidable on ExTwitter that it's become a meme.

John Herrman, over at New York Mag's Intelligencer, has a ridiculously long investigation determining who is behind all that spam (basically a company doing the modern equivalent of an old phone sex line). But the reason the article caught my attention was that Herrman kicks off the article by highlighting Elon's evolution on fighting spam. It's kinda glorious:

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying," wroteElon Musk in May 2022. The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow," he threatened shortly after the purchase closed. A new subscription service, he claimed, would destroy the bots" with his new anti-bot bots." In 2023, the threat seemed to evolve. We're trying hard to stop bots & trolls on this platform," he wrote in July. Fighting bot and troll farms is hard," he conceded. The bot wars continue," he posted in an August update. January of this year brought a shift in tone: Bots are the devil (sigh)." In March, more signals of an extended, brutal campaign: Stopping crypto/porn spam bots is not easy, but we're working on it."

Yeah, so, that was kinda the point of my old speed run post. One of the things that you often learn regarding trust & safety is that there are often good reasons why things are done, even if the end results are messy, and assuming you can magically do better with none of the experience or understanding of the tradeoffs means you're going to make a ton of mistakes.

Now, it's no surprise that Musk has failed to stop spam on the platform. Or even that it's gotten significantly worse of a problem. Content moderation at scale remains impossible to do well.

But, you know, Musk might have done a better job if he hadn't fired everyone at the company who actually understood how to fight spam and replaced them with his own highly misguided intuition" on where the spam was coming from. Content moderation is a constant struggle, and spam is a part of that. If Musk could reflect for just one moment, it might be nice if he realized how stupidly over confident he was that he would be able to solve it. And also, how wrong he was to insist that the previous management wasn't taking the issue seriously.