Mark Cuban & Elon Musk try to fix Twitter's Bot Crisis

The reoccurring spam crisis has been prominent on social media for some time, using fake accounts, posting fake content, and misusing platforms for personal gains etc.

American entrepreneur Marc Andreessen took this problem to the social media platform Twitter, for solutions to a screenshot of a spammer pretending to be Marc in a fake ad to promote a crypto giveaway, captioning the post “What algorithm could possibly catch this type of content?”

Elon Musk also recognised this issue, responding to Andreessen’s post “Humans.” In turn, this created discussion around the idea to eradicate the issue of dealing with high quantities of cryptocurrency scams, spam ads and bots.

Billionaire Mark Cuban suggested that the problem could be solved through adding an optimistic rollups or layer 2 solution to Dogecoin (DOGE). Using Cuban’s framework would allow users to post on Twitter on an unlimited basis, but everyone who uses it needs to pay 1 DOGE (￡0.10) as collateral.

However, if anyone challenges a post, humans can confirm the post as spam, then users who flagged the post receive the share of the original spammers DOGE. As a result, spammers or spam accounts would need to put up 100 Dogecoins as collateral for accessibility to make future posts. On the other hand, if the posts were not considered spam, the user who flagged the post would lose their DOGE.?

It presents users with real life benefits and consequences for posting, challenging tweets that are received on the platform. However, those who engaged with the tweet highlighted users with big bank accounts could easily just “out-contest” posts marked as spam and continue to post harmful or irrelevant content.

Many users who support Dogecoin believe it is a fair way to deal with spammers. Contrastingly, it creates scepticism about practicality of the app by changing the business model requiring users to pay and forcing users into cryptocurrency for spamming, driving away users who may just be interested in tweeting.

This also raised the question of fake users using the platform solely for profitable gains for example a reply tweet to Mark Cuban’s post was “Nah. You didn’t think this through. How do you deal with dishonest actors flagging spam that isn’t and humans confirming it is spam just to get ‘spammers’ dog coin?”

Nevertheless, Elon Musk has pledged to make ‘significant improvements’ to Twitter calling crypto spam bots the “single most annoying problem on Twitter.” A follow-up from his last post on the subject regarding spam bots “will defeat the spam bots or die trying.”

This is a very interesting topic of discussion considering both Elon Musk and Mark Cuban have been pro-Dogecoin for some time. Do you think social media channels should have standard monetary benefits and consequences for posting to avoid spam accounts and pages? If not, how do you suppose we handle this crisis.