While Elon Musk withdrew from his proposed takeover of Twitter partly because of the high presence of bots, a former senior executive of the company denounces the security problems of the social network. This rise in fake profiles is also being felt in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, through spam emails linking to scams in response to threads.
Twitter faces countless bots
Twitter is a widely used social network in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but the number of bots swarming on it 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.
So Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security, goes back to the platform’s weaknesses. He alleges that Twitter is not able to accurately assess how many bots are polluting the social network. On the other hand, he points to serious shortcomings regarding the security of user data.
He would have started to raise the alarm several months ago, which would have led to his dismissal last January. Twitter, for its part, points instead to his poor professional performance:
“Mr. Zatko was fired from his senior position at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance. “
A whistleblower to government agencies
Peiter Zatko sent a dossier to the US Congress and federal agencies last month detailing all of Twitter’s security failings. For example, too many people had access to sensitive information.
According to him, one or more of the company’s employees are in fact 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 on cryptocurrencies
As far as the blockchain ecosystem is concerned, bots on Twitter are also a problem. As soon as a profile with even a modicum of reach posts content related to cryptocurrencies, fake accounts comment almost instantly:
Comments from fake Twitter profiles
The screenshot above shows an example of spam comments on our own Twitter feed. Of course, we are not an isolated case and this is the lot of a large part of the crypto community. While for most users, these fraudulent links have no consequences, they can still redirect gullible people to scams.
One of the purposes of these scams is to extract cryptocurrencies from users. This can be done by sending funds in the hope of receiving more than the amount sent, or by signing a transaction that gives permission to a fraudulent smart contract to empty our wallet. It is therefore advisable to learn about good practices to limit such mishaps.
Twitter’s lack of concrete action on this problem highlights the limits of increased centralisation. This could then become a boon for social networks designed for Web3, as is the case for example for Lens Protocol, developed by the Aave teams.
