NEW YORK – Scientists revealed in a study last month that X, formerly known as Twitter, has a real bot problem, with about 1,140 artificial intelligence-powered accounts that “post machine-generated content and steal selfies to create fake personas.”
The research, conducted by a student-teacher team at the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, found a network of fake accounts on X in what they called the “Fox8” botnet, which reportedly utilizes ChatGPT to generate content that “aims to promote suspicious website and spread harmful content.”
The bot accounts attempt to convince people to invest in fake cryptocurrencies, and have even been thought to steal from existing crypto wallets, scientists Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer found.
Their posts often include hashtags such as #bitcoin, #crypto, and #web3, and frequently interact with human-run accounts like Forbes’ crypto-centered X account (@ForbesCrypto) and blockchain-centered news site Watcher Guru (@WatcherGuru), the study found.
Beyond looting crypto, Fox8 accounts “were found to distort online conversations and spread misinformation in various contexts, from elections to public health crises,” Yang and Menczer said.
To appear more human-like, this botnet — a network of hundreds of harmful, spam accounts — not only nab photos from real users but also “frequently interact with each other through retweets and replies,” boast profile descriptions, and even “have 74 followers, 140 friends and 149.6 tweets on average.”
These elements suggest that “Fox8 bots are actively participating in activities on Twitter [now known as X],” and make them more believable to the human user.
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