Elon Musk stated “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by … authenticating all humans.” There is no elaboration on what this means, but it would be fair to assume that to make anonymous accounts on Twitter no longer be possible.
Whilst this has many positive implications, particularly when it comes to some of the offensive behaviour associated with anonymity on social media, this does pose a challenge to the huge crypto community wishing to remain anonymous on Twitter.
Crypto spam bots work like a phishing scam. The bots listen to twitter and monitor for tweets that look like customers in need of support from crypto businesses. The bot masks as the business and responds, usually with a link that tricks the customer into providing them with a recovery phrase that enables the scammers to steal your crypto.
Musk has said, ‘A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots, and the bot armies that are on Twitter.’
How this will be achieved is likely to be related to removing anonymity from the platform, but it is difficult to see how it will be achieved.
Elon is not a fan of the NFT profile pictures that Twitter launched in the US. He famously described them as annoying, but it is unclear as to whether the annoyance is with the feature itself or that Twitter focussed their efforts on this when they could be dealing with more pressing issues such as spam bots. We’ll have to wait and see.
Whatever happens, helping crypto investors keep safe is important to us at Coincover and we are excited to see how Elon Musk supports this through his acquisition of Twitter.