While Elon Musk withdrew from his proposed takeover of Twitter partly because of the significant presence of bots, a former senior executive of the company denounces the security problems of the social network. This upsurge in fake profiles is also felt in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, through spam emails referring to scams, in response to threads.
Twitter facing the countless bots
Twitter is a widely used social network in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but the number of bots that swarm there greatly deteriorates the user experience. This amount of fake profiles is actually the official reason why Elon Musk pulled out of his $44 billion buyout deal.
This is how Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security, comes back on the weaknesses of the platform. He alleges that Twitter would not be able to accurately assess how many bots are polluting the social network. On the other hand, he points out serious shortcomings regarding the security of user data.
He would have started to give the alert several months ago, which would have led to his dismissal last January. For its part, Twitter instead points to the poor professional performance of the person concerned:
“Mr. Zatko was terminated from his senior management position at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance.”
A whistleblower to government agencies
Peiter Zatko sent a dossier to the U.S. Congress as well as federal agencies last month detailing all of Twitter’s security failings. For example, too many people would have access to sensitive information.
According to him, one or more of the company’s employees would in fact be part of foreign government intelligence services.
In addition, he claims that when a user deletes his or her account, the data is not actually deleted properly.
The impact of this situation on cryptocurrencies
When it comes to the blockchain ecosystem, bots on Twitter are also a problem. As soon as a profile with even a minimal reach posts content related to cryptocurrencies, fake accounts comment almost instantly.
This is the lot of a large part of the crypto community. If for most users, these fraudulent links have no consequences, they can still redirect gullible people to scams.
One of the goals of these scams is to extract cryptocurrencies from users. This can be done by sending funds hoping to receive more than the amount sent or by signing a transaction authorizing a fraudulent smart contract to empty our wallet. It is therefore advisable to learn about good practices to limit such mishaps.
The lack of concrete actions from Twitter regarding this problem highlights the limits of increased centralization. This could become a boon for social networks designed for Web3, as it is for example the case for Lens Protocol, developed by the Aave teams.
