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ExTwitter Misclassifies Your Spam Reports So It Doesn’t Have To Take Down Spammers

from the everything’s-going-just-great dept

Elon Musk keeps insisting that stopping spam bots is a huge priority. After all, he said he’d either stop them or die trying.

And, apparently one way to try to stop spam is to stop allowing people to report spam. I’m guessing this is just a mistake on a site that has massive errors pretty much every day, but it’s still crazy. Apparently, exTwitter no longer lets you actually report spam. If you try, it automatically misclassifies it as something else, and then you get a notice that because it’s not that something else, it remains online.

Spam problems solved!

I first spotted this over on Bluesky from user Q.H. Stone, who noted that if you now try to report spam on ExTwitter, rather than saying “we received your report for spam,” it instead says (incorrectly) “we received your report for sensitive media.”

Then, one of the three remaining trust & safety hamsters on the wheel looks at the spam, looks at the report, and says “this isn’t sensitive media,” so nothing to do here:

While I hid the user account in this case, I will note that (of course) it is paying for Twitter Blue, Twitter Verified, Verified, X Premium, so perhaps that’s why it’s not getting removed for spam. But, rest assured, all that account is doing is spamming people with crypto spam. But, apparently, it’s okay, because it’s not “sensitive media.”

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Companies: twitter, x

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Comments on “ExTwitter Misclassifies Your Spam Reports So It Doesn’t Have To Take Down Spammers”

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38 Comments

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

It will come full circle.

  • a bot account will post GPT-4 generated tweets
  • advertising content will be posted aside the tweets by automated processes
  • a series of bots will respond and/or ‘like’ the tweets, “views” for the ad revenue
  • crypto spam will be introduced by other bots
  • yet other bots will troll the crypto spammers

Humans are no longer necessary; it will become an engine to suck money from hopeful advertisers. Briefly.

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Anonymous Coward says:

So, you report spam on X… and that reports sensitive media on “Twitter” (blue bird).

Is that the product of a smartest genius of earth gifted by the hand of God to have absolute knowledge, or am I too confused to understand anything at all?

I guess that I’m, just like him, become too desperate to make sense of anything of with X thing. (Maybe he rebrand it “⌦” and move on).

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

I report spam on X nearly every day. It works fine.

  • Did you try reporting spam today?
  • If you did, do you get the same results reported in the post?
  • If you do not, what do you differently that results in a spam report that is explicitly labeled in the reply as having reported spam instead of sensitive media?

If you’re going to claim that this is user error, then be useful and point out how to get the desired result.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

I reported spam just now. I got a “like” from a fake woman, as usual. I used the “…” menu to “Report xxx”, got a popup window asking for a reason, I selected spam, submitted, hit “Done” on the next window, and got a notification that X has received my report. It’s no different today than any other day.

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That Anonymous Coward (profile) says:

Hurm… someone finally woke up.

I’ve been on a spambot reporting spree (mainly because its no longer like 7 steps to report them) & was shocked to get the notice that they got my report.
I called out support and space karen about it was spam not sensitive media, made a comment about perhaps testing things on dev not prod.

Report
·
October 18, 2023
You submitted a report
View Rule <– link to ALL the rules, not the one I selected in reporting… because that would make sense.

Olivia
@Olivia1429172
What’s next
Our team and technology will review your report. If we find a rule violation, we’ll let you know what actions we’re taking.
What’s our process?
Context matters. We consider the following factors when enforcing our rules (this isn’t a complete list):

Does the reported content target people because of their identity?
How severe is this violation?
Was the report submitted by the person being targeted?

Creating duplicate reports will not accelerate our process.

heh
https://twitter.com/That_AC/status/1713123029968900216

.@elonmusk
Mr. Musk, it is bad most of my engagement is spam bots liking my tweets, but when I report them for spam & your system says we got your report for sensitive media it doesn’t really seem worth reporting them any more.
Maybe stop making changes on prod till you test?

https://twitter.com/That_AC/status/1713088106381898173

.@Support

“We received your report for sensitive media”
I reported the accounts for SPAM.
The endless stream of accounts trying to lure users to websites to find “true love” or hotter pics.
SPAM, not sensitive media.
I clearly hit the button for spam so WTFM8??

I expected more from Elon, especially after he ignored my plea for help b/c an account was trying to sell me drugs.

That Anonymous Coward (profile) says:

Re:

sigh…

got an email from twitter informing me the follow up to my report.
(one of many)

Some how my spam report got them to look at the images & put content warnings on them, and here are tips if you don’t want to see naughty pictures.

https://twitter.com/That_AC/status/1715838675311854048

I might just go back to blocking until I can’t block any more accounts.

Flakbait (profile) says:

Equivalent medical rule

There’s a “law” in medicine (from Samuel Shem’s House of God): “If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever.” Meaning that if you don’t look too hard you won’t find extra work for yourself. It would appear that Musk has read the book.

And that law is the 10th of the 13 laws, or in roman numerals, Law X. Possibly a coincidence. But then again, maybe not.

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