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Elon Musk has made a lot about how he is going to rid his newly-acquired social media site Twitter of the bots. On Sunday, part of that clean-up happened according to Musk, who triumphantly tweeted in emoji form that the bots were now dead.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.For a test of his own personal Twitter feed, Musk asked (again in emojis) that all bots and trolls attack him, before declaring "cool, the bots are so far unable to swarm to the top of my replies!".
No detailed analysis has been published by Twitter or others to confirm that bot activity has decreased. However, while his fans declared it had taken Musk "41 days to fix a decade-long problem", one Twitter user tweeted a two-word test that confirmed there is still some significant level of bot activity on the platform.
Twitter user ChairladySpears said those magic words, "sugar daddy", and sure enough her replies were filled with bots of the spamming variety, offering her "financial support" and asking her to "dm me baby".
Following the test, other users tried replying with keywords that bots search for, with much the same result.
Musk has not reacted to the sugar daddy test, and has spent his morning tweeting about "the woke mind virus", and agreeing with accounts claiming that the world is "either in a mass awakening event or total collapse of society".
