Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has been ramping up efforts to solve the perennial problem of Spam Bots on Twitter. Even before purchasing the social media platform for about $44 billion last week, Musk had promised “to defeat the spam bots or die trying”, an initiative that has received immense support from Twitter users.
However, taking down spam may not be that easy, invoking suggestions on how Musk could proceed with his plan.
In a Tweet on Sunday, Billionaire Mark Cuban who is also the owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks wrote;
“We add an optimistic rollup to Doge. Everyone puts up 1 doge for unlimited posts. If anyone contests a post and humans confirm its spam, they get the spammers doge”.
He went on to further state that the flagged spammer has to post 100 times more doge but if the flagging was wrong, the contester loses their Doge.
As of writing Mark’s DOGE suggestion has received more than 10k likes. Musk has also responded, stating “not a bad idea” while Doge co-creator Billy Markus wrote, “I like it a lot”.
While most Dogecoin proponents on Twitter think that Mark’s suggestion is great, some, however, feel that introducing DOGE could convert Twitter into a pay-to-chat platform, warding off not only scammers but also genuine users.
Others are concerned that “forcing” users to use Doge to tweet would be bad for Twitter’s business. Some stated that introducing the concept would allow “malicious actors to exploit” other users by falsely flagging those they disagree with. There was also the risk of losing collateral for falsely flagging spam.
Even before purchasing Twitter, Musk who has previously called crypto spambots the “single most annoying problem on Twitter” had received more suggestions on how to tackle the bots problem. Michael Saylor had suggested that Twitter can solve the problem of spammers and bots by “monetizing malice”. This could be achieved by allowing real humans to get verified with an Orange Check by posting a one-time security deposit. Twitter can then limit comments/DMS to verified accounts and bad actors will be forced to forfeit their deposit.
Jack Mallers, CEO of bitcoin payments app Strike had also suggested Twitter optimize its API to include Strike’s proof-of-concept. “Anyone could make micropayment Twitter over lightening, verifying themselves and the spam would be dead.”
That said, it would seem that most suggestions point back at monetizing tweets to prevent bots. With Elon musk publicly supporting Dogecoin, terming it as the “strongest” cryptocurrency for payments, it remains to be seen whether he will leapfrog Dogecoin to become the ultimate shield against malicious Twitter actors.
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