Elon Musk added me to his list

Apparently a BTC & ETH giveaway

Hey guys, I have big news to share. I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve been added to a list.

Apparently Elon Musk is giving away a lot of Bitcoin and Ether and somehow my twitter account got on his radar and he sent me this very generous invite. So if you don’t hear back from me, it’s because I hit it big.

What the hell is going on with social media? There are so many obvious scams out there. I’ve gotten this invite at least a dozen times so far, with the same fake Elon Musk and the same list name.

What is the point of Twitter lists anyway? I don’t ever remember hearing anything about them but here they are. And you can add anyone to a list? What problem do “lists” solve? I don’t think anyone in the history of Twitter has thought “you know what would be a cool feature? The ability to get added to lists from people I have no association with”.

I read this fascinating piece this morning about someone stealing someone’s identity on Instagram, the person reaching out to Instagram, and Instagram brushing them off telling them he’s not a priority. In the meantime this person is engaging people in crypto scams.

A lot of high profile people have been complaining about this but it appears to be getting worse, almost like new scammers are turned on to the idea because of publicity about the ease in which they can pull it off. I personally would scrap the whole lists. I don’t see why someone I have no connection with can push something to me. I don’t think anyone wants to be on these lists.

The other problem is spam replies, which are harder to detect. But even those are incredibly lazy. A lot more can be done.

The other weird thing about reporting lists is that you don’t have an option for THIS IS A SCAM. You have to resort to “I’m not interested in this scam”.

If you select it’s abusive or harmful, these are the options you get.

You know what encourages self-harm? Someone scamming you and stealing your money.

My favorite moment was someone on Twitter told Paul Graham he doesn’t know how spam filtering works. I can’t find the tweet but it was really a “don't you know who I am” moment.

The weirdest thing is that it just doesn’t appear a priority. Twitter is great at banning people. They ban people all the time. But for some reason none of the social media companies take spam and crypto scams seriously. Or at least it doesn’t appear to be working. They don’t even make it easy to report.

Again, there’s no reason a brand new account should be able to create a list called “BTC&ETH Giveaway” and invite thousands of random people to the list. If your spam detection isn’t catching that, what else is it missing?

Can we start calling spam “misinformation”

I didn’t follow the giveaway closely, but I suspect nothing was actually given away. Unless of course if you count victims giving away their cryptocurrency to the scammer. So technically the “giveaway” is misinformation.

So let’s start calling spam “misinformation” and maybe we can get the social media companies to do something about it. Until then, Twitter seems to be more concerned with using their engineering efforts into making some profile pictures hexagons.