[zacte]

Why do you believe spammers - who make money off the platform, would be unwilling to spend a nominal sum to stay relevant on the platform.

If that is their business model, it would be pretty stupid to not use the tools provided by the platform to stay relevant, more so when the cost is as cheap as $8 (presumably they're making more than $8 a month, otherwise it wouldn't be lucrative enough to bother).

Whereas an average user that simply wants to consume content would probably just find an alternate for free because they're not gaining any monetary value...

[rglullis]

Paying for the service does not give the right to spam. Any spammer would be kicked out on the first report, which would make the whole operation expensive and impossible to automate. You can not generate valid credit cards automatically like you can simply generate a bot that signs up for free.

[KomoD]

You very much can generate a ton of valid cards, or use stolen ones. In fact, people have already started using Twitter Blue as a way to help with their spamming (both crypto spam, and t-shirt spam)

[rglullis]

> You very much can generate a ton of valid cards, or use stolen ones.

Then you raise your fraud detection controls and only activate the user after payment has been cleared out.

The point is that spam is not economically viable if it requires payment. It's not rocket science.

[KomoD]

> The point is that spam is not economically viable if it requires payment. It's not rocket science.

That is very much not true at all.

[rglullis]

Please be specific: how do you think it would be viable for spammers to create bots on Twitter (or any other social network) if it costs (at least) 1 dollar to set an account and if you still keep systems in place that can detect/report/suspend accounts that show bot behavior?

[jrflowers]

I agree with this. What many people do not realize with the ease with which anyone can spin up thousands of bots that absolutely sound human nowadays, spamming has never been more difficult or less rewarding.

All Twitter would have to do is invent and maintain software that reliably detects ai-generated text with zero false positives. Done and done.

Should they do that and the spammers still seem motivated, they would have to do something outlandish like employ large amounts of humans to replace the bots, which isn’t something that has ever been feasible for spammers.

People really underestimate quite a few things, like Twitter’s ability to simply invent bot-fighting software of heretofore unseen power and complexity, the difficulty spammers have accessing dollars and other resources, and how unmotivated and prone to giving up spammers tend to be.