An hour on X reveals a platform riddled with spammers and misfiring algorithms

These days we don’t use X (Twitter) too much because of the high volume of spammers. Of course we copy and paste most of our articles to the platform so our comparatively smaller number of followers can see them, but usually that’s about it.

But we do from time to time check in for an hour or so to see how the platform is faring and to see if they’ve made much progress. And today was one of those days.

Well, oh dear.

Logging in and the first thing we noticed is some bizarre trending hashtags in the “What’s Happening” section that is supposed to keep up with trending topics.

The hashtag “#TT_WhatsApp_ОО966О54О6288З4” was featured, which seems an odd “topic”, and needless to say, when clicking on it to see what posts were using this hashtag, is soon became clear that it was being used almost exclusively by spammers to get engagement for their posts which were largely a mixture of random videos and poorly curated memes. There was no obvious reason why “#TT_WhatsApp_ОО966О54О6288З4” was specifically trending (for the better part of a day).

It’s worth mentioning that the “What’s Happening” section (previously called Trending or Explore) used to be curated by humans, but this was replaced by AI during Elon Musk’s reign as X boss.

Sponsored Content. Continued below…

Also trending this hour was the #RefugeesWelcome hashtag, which seems like a far more normal topic that you’d expect to see on social media. Until, that is, you clicked on it.

When clicking on a trending hashtag topic, you’re taken to the “top” tweets (xeets?) centred around that topic, which is the tweets that X’s algorithms have deemed both popular and relevant enough to appear as “top tweets”. However in this case, out of the top 10 “top” tweets, 6 were pornographic images and another showing a graphic injury. None related to the hashtag.

Finally, in the hour we spent on X, take a look at the comments on our post highlighting the problem. Overrun by “account recovery” spammers. (More information on these scams in our post here.)

All of these issues we experienced in only a handful of minutes using the platform, and are a reflection on how other users are reporting finding X.

It’s all indicative of a platform that is increasingly overrun by spammers that are exploiting the algorithms that are becoming gradually worse at detecting and promoting good content in lieu of spam content. A platform that has become overly reliant on automation and has progressively balked at human moderation (a potential consequence on Musk cutting the X workforce by up to 80%).

With reports suggesting the valuation of X is still at least 70% lower since Musk’s takeover, it will be interesting to see if this decline in moderation will have an adverse effect on actual engagement and active user figures.