Highlights §
- The bots have not been defeated — if anything, they have become much more visible across the platform in ads, searches, and, especially, replies. By early 2024, they seemed to be speaking in one voice, with a unified message, in response to virtually any post. They said: “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.” (View Highlight)
- Spam is hard. No real platform has solved it completely, and none ever will. Spammers evolve, platforms catch up, spammers evolve again, and so on until the last post is posted and the last user signs out. Individual spam tactics, however, do tend to have short lives, and while PIB won’t be with us forever, it’s notable that it has been with us for so long — a consequence, perhaps, of the near-total elimination of the teams that used to deal with such things at Twitter. Long enough to become a platformwide joke. Long enough to become genuinely sort of annoying even to the users who think it’s funny. And long enough to get some idea of who is posting all that P in all those B’s, and why. (View Highlight)
- Kimberly’s bio does not contain any ░N░U░D░E░S░, but it does include a ░L░I░N░K░ to a domain called Xkos. Xkos links are a common feature in PIB profiles, which often have no followers and rarely exist more than a few days: (View Highlight)
- Clicking one of these Xkos links will instantly redirect you to another domain called Meetdats. (Xkos is one of many disposable domains that redirect to Meetdats, and Meetdats is one of many very similar destination links.) There, you’ll encounter one of dozens of fake sites: imitation OnlyFans pages, fake porn games with an Electronic Arts logo, a bunch of TikTok-like interfaces with names like TitsTok: (View Highlight)
- These sites then funnel visitors through a quizzy sign-up process that suggests access to hot singles/nudes/live videos, etc. is just a few clicks away. Typical profile questions (How old are you?) are mixed in with suggestive teases (These women only desire quick sex. Not dating. Do you agree to this request?) before eventually redirecting users one more time. (View Highlight)
- All the Xkos links lead, through Meetdats, to the same ultimate destination, a “dating” site called Provocative Neighbors, where users enter another horny sign-up flow, after which they can chat — for a fee — with the site’s overly eager-to-please “users,” who live extremely “nearby.” (View Highlight)
- So far, this is a pretty standard sign-up flow for many online services, including, to pick one incredibly not horny example, LinkedIn: Promise the user what they want, get them most of the way through the sign-up process, and right before giving it to them, hit them with that credit-card form. (View Highlight)
- It’s after payment that things get strange and rather dark. Provocative Neighbors is pretty honest about part of what it does, at least in its terms of service, which one imagines few prospective customers end up reading: (View Highlight)
- To recap: The user checks for ░P░I░B░ on X; the user bounces through a series of redirects and fake dating sites; and the user reaches Provocative Neighbors, somehow decides to sign up, and begins conversing with another “member,” who is in fact a freelance operator getting a cut of the user’s payments to the site. So-called “flirt sites” have been around for a while, luring new users with misleading ads on low-rent websites. Now, a few of them appear to be staying one step ahead of the folks at X, blanketing the “global town square” in pornographic flyers while the world’s richest man shakes his fist at the sky. (View Highlight)
- In short, this is why PIB accounts exist: If just one unfortunate X user clicks through — and through, and through, and through — and ultimately signs up for a scam dating site, the site’s owner makes bank, and maybe a freelance PIB spammer gets a few bucks. Stacked-up advertising and affiliate networks are the lifeblood of the broader spam economy (and, with less porn, a lot of online publishing). “A lot of the guys that are running the dating click funnels have been doing it for ten years,” said an adult marketer who goes by SocialManipulator on sites like BlackHatWorld. “Twitter is huge for that, one of the biggest places to convert to dating sites,” he said. “Now it’s just leaving the sex industry and hitting the mainstream.” (View Highlight)
- One former affiliate marketer, who now sells proxy software that helps spammers evade social-media bans — and who claimed, without sharing their contact information, to “know guys” who do this sort of spam — described to me a fairly unsophisticated and only partially automated style of operation: affiliate marketers hiring “virtual assistants” from low-income countries who use spam-oriented social-media-management software to run hundreds of X accounts at a time. The posts are published automatically — most of the systems “utilize web browsers, and they look very humanlike” — but the accounts take a lot of upkeep and supervision; they need to be run through proxies, post on credible schedules, and avoid obvious detectable behavioral patterns (posting patterns, apparently not so much). They get banned a lot and need to be replaced, which is time-consuming and expensive at scale. As with content moderation by social-media platforms, which rely on armies of invisible contractors to help deal with spam that automated tools can’t catch or parse, there’s probably a bit more human labor involved in PIB posting than there seems at first. (View Highlight)
- SocialManipulator disagreed. “The high clip you’re seeing of posts, that’s probably someone with their own botnet,” he said. “They have a bank of usernames and profile pictures, and they recycle.” It’s unusual for such low-effort spam posts to break through so thoroughly on a major platform, he pointed out, but as long as they still are, they’re cheap, and worth the cost if even a minuscule number of people click through. “Your audience is dumb,” he said. He offered an explanation for the seemingly random deployment of PIB spam under a wide range of posts, often from accounts with few followers: they’re not replying to particular subjects or unusual terms in hopes of finding relevant posts or interested customers, but rather targeting posts which contain ultra-common terms like “the,” at rates low enough to evade bans, at least for a few days. (View Highlight)