Chinese sextortion scammers are flooding Twitter

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 229 points –
restofworld.org

Scammers are targeting Chinese-language users, harassing political dissidents and influential figures.

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Honestly, the only real solution is leaving Twitter. With the plan to remove the block feature this will only get worse and worse. I really don’t see this sort of thing getting better anytime soon or later.

Some options: Mastodon is great, push through that initial anxiety about servers and just hop on. Not threads! Unless you’re okay with FaceBook taking, very literally, all your data. Bluesky I’ve heard is okay, but it’s another billionaire project that has an algorithm to do whatever they want.

How do you find people you want to follow on other instances with mastodon? I've tried searching all kinds of ways with username and instance, but it doesn't find the people I'm looking for (specific accounts)

https://www.theverge.com/23519279/mastodon-instance-follow-friend

Yeah Ive already done this, they don't appear when searching...is this method only usable for the website version?

Can't say that I know for sure, but could be that the app doesn't support this (yet)?

I came find you like this from the Mastodon app.

I'm finding you like this.

Yes, we can follow Lemmy users from Mastodon.

Maybe the accounts you're looking for are in defederated instances?

No they should be on large federated instances too...but that is not my mastodon account, I have an account in a different instance for mastodon.

trending works great now, hashtags always worked, and many apps support features like following instances. The search feature is upcoming so maybe wait for that to drop

I really think Elon just wants to destroy twitter to finally put an end to that hellhole

If he was competent at that, he wouldn't be sinking it alongside his own reputation, he'd get his puppet CEO to undermine it and then call it inevitable.

I think he wants this X app to be a thing, he just has no idea what he's doing

I think I've heard this from a podcast but don't remember which, but one conspiracy is that Musk is deliberately running the company to the ground, but is masking it with "optimistic" business decisions to prove he was trying to keep the company afloat, so as to avoid lawsuits and compensations when it goes under? I'm not that well versed in law so I can't verify it's legitimacy though, so take it with a grain of salt.

He is already being sued for a variety of issues related to how he is handling Twitter. The conspiracy has to go all the way around into suggesting that he intentionally wants everyone to think he is a fool, at expense of his other businesses, to make decisions even average people believe to be clueless and destructive, when he could arrange for that to happen much more subtly.

Seems simpler to me to just believe he is a fool. This whole conspiracy seems to come from sheer disbelief that someone so wealthy could be so stupid. But it seems to me it proves that wealth and competence or intelligence aren't correlated after all.

Exactly. It’s Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Stupidity alone more than adequately explains what Elon is doing to Twitter.

He is connected to Thiel who is connected to US intel. Perhaps decisions were made that Twitter is too influencial and influenced by users during elections? Just a theory.

If anyone might be deliberately trying to kill Twitter, maybe it's whoever financed it. Wouldn't they realize that Elon offered for Twitter far more than it was worth and that repaying it is very unlikely?

I actually wonder if the point is to launder money through it? You buy it at a certain valuation. You tank it while promising investors that you have big ideas that will have them making money hand over fist in no time. You instead, make significant investment elsewhere using an unknown shell company or something to invest in its competitors, forcing users off the original platform and onto something else that makes you money. You insure it in some way so that you can get a payout when it finally whistles it's last death rattle, the investors get a payout, you get a payout, the platform dies, and you move on to something else.

I have no idea how it all works but haven't most of us seen The Producers? Same basic premise. Bet against yourself. Take the winnings while leaving the liability elsewhere.

You're better than I am at it already lol.
The conspiracy is on! 🍿

Haven't seen The Producers before. Do you recommend it?

I do recommend it. It's great fun and I found it very enjoyable.

Yeah, nah.

More likely situation is the ma child is simply bad at running a business. This is backed up by his history.

Wasn't there this thing of grandsons ruining their grandparent's business?

But seriously, Elon is doing it too wrong for it to be accidental

"The new verification system will prevent bot spam!" - Some rich guy who has no idea how the internet works

Seriously, it's been such a pain reading Chinese content on Twitter/X/whatever. If you post any stuff that says something critical about China, no matter if it's news, opinions, or just shit posts, and have some amount of Chinese speaking followers, you are now guaranteed to have sex-bots spam commenting your every post. And you can't do anything about it, since they have multiple accounts, and some just leave the comment and block you so you can't remove it.

Edit: grammar

some just leave the comment and block you so you can't remove it.

Wait, is someone comments on a post, then blocks the OP that comment can't be deleted?

I haven't dealt with them personally before, but I did ask a poster before if they could hide the spam comments, and they said no since they couldn't see it.

It’s going to be an even bigger mess if Elon goes through with getting rid of block and only leaving people with a mute. There won’t be any way to stop these porn bots.

There are a ton on twitter generally, more than 80 percent of my followers on a small account are obvious fake profiles/porn bots. But they don't reply often, they mostly like.

I don't get it. Why do people even like Twitter, old or new?

Twitter used to be an absolutely great way to keep up with breaking news, because so many reporters were there. I joined twitter during the Arab Spring, because so much that was happening was being talked about on Twitter. Same with a lot of social movements - twitter was a place where you could make something local go global. If anything was happening in the world, twitter was the place to follow it.

But now? Now, it’s a desert of information. It’s depressing to watch a place that was so vibrant become the home of Musk shills and weird right wingers. I loved Twitter, before Elon took over. Now, it’s fading, and fast.

It was good place to keep up with artists and game developers. They share each other's work in a way that is great to discover more artists and games that you didn't know about.

Grumpy gamer moved to mastadon so I gave it a crack. It's great. Lots of game devs there.

Oh? Who’s on Mastodon? I could always use more people to follow!

Yep, before deleting my Twitter account after the muskrat invasion I used Twitter to keep up with the developers in my niche. As they usually have insights or I can get a sense on how the tech is going to progress by reading their updates.

I could say this about most social media. Im on facebook just as a last ditch way for friends and family to reach me, linkedin for keeping contact with workmates, never saw a usecase for twitter but I see folks ones below.

I don't think anyone liked it. More like tolerated it because of a combination of network effects and it being less shitty than Facebook.

At least, that's why I was on Twitter. People I wanted to follow were there.

They are all over LinkedIn with really obvious fake profiles. LinkedIn is doing nothing to stop it.

LinkedIn is feeling like abandonware.

It may as well shut their doors in my opinion. No amount of changes or marketing is going to turn it into what they wanted it to be at this point. It's at the point where if someone starts casually talking about LinkedIn they get sideways glances as to why they would even be using it, unless they work in HR.