Elon Musk defends crackdown on bot operations on X

I'm referring to individuals orchestrating large-scale bot spam operations that undoubtedly degrade content quality," replied the billionaire to a follower

New Delhi: Some people are running huge bot operations on the micro-blogging site X, which is reducing the content quality to a great extent, Elon Musk said on Saturday, as he defended his decision to act on spam accounts which resulted in many users losing followers.

Earlier this month, the social media platform kicked off the exercise to remove bots.

---

“I’m just talking about people running massive bot spam operations that unequivocally reduce the quality of content,” the billionaire responded to a follower.

He clarified that the ban on fake engagement refers to those who use bots to artificially inflate their engagement.

“Botting for fake engagement,” said the Tesla CEO.

The action came as porn bots flooded X in the last few months. Earlier this week, Musk announced that new X users may be charged for posting content on the micro-blogging site.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said, “Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.”

“Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease,” the billionaire commented.

He also said that Chinese short-video platform TikTok should not be banned in the US, even though such a ban may benefit the X platform.

“Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression. It is not what America stands for,” Musk posted.