Anyone else tired? - a brief look at how a piece of spam evolved over Christmas 2023

Spam is king

On December 27th 2023, Twitter user @The4ourthBranch expressed his indignation at the state of Twitter replies.

The first person to use this phrase on Twitter

While I am not an active Twitter user, this is a cry that I could get behind. And clearly, others agree.

The various platform changes over the course of 2023 have caused spam to explode on Twitter, and with monetary incentives provided to those who can generate the most interactions, this changed the nature of spam.

Indeed, this Twitter user probably made a buck and a half from this statement of indignation.

And somebody noticed.

Oh my god what

Screenshots of Twitter users repeatedly saying 'Anyone else tired of seeing random videos and memes in replies that are completed unrelated to the original tweet?' Screenshots of Twitter users repeatedly saying 'Anyone else tired of seeing random videos and memes in replies that are completed unrelated to the original tweet?' Screenshots of Twitter users repeatedly saying 'Anyone else tired of seeing random videos and memes in replies that are completed unrelated to the original tweet?' Screenshots of Twitter users repeatedly saying 'Anyone else tired of seeing random videos and memes in replies that are completed unrelated to the original tweet?' Screenshots of Twitter users repeatedly saying 'Anyone else tired of seeing random videos and memes in replies that are completed unrelated to the original tweet?'

From being a cry against the state of Twitter replies, it itself became a statement of spam, with hundreds of accounts, verified or otherwise, spamming the statement onto posts.

It is how I became aware of it: a baseball clip about Ohtani had this as one of the replies. Initially, I agreed, and clicked on it to see further discussion, where it became evident that Twitter users had already became familiar with this spam.

For all the claims about platform moderation being hard, this feels like the other extreme: users have become hyper-aware of spam, and yet are powerless to stop it.

And it evolves

Some bots modify the script. What is the reason for this, I do not know.

First fork of the original script

This would hardly be the first modification of the spam. A user slightly modified it on December 30th.

Second fork of the original script

And the bots would pick it up in a manner of days.

Second fork of the original script

But this one didn't spread too far.

Wait, we have spam against spam

Users inevitably become annoyed. Many would rally against the more engagement heavy posts.

And then begin creating mini-spam themselves.

Twitter users creating counter-spam Twitter users creating counter-spam Twitter users creating counter-spam

But the fact that people were trying to spam against the spam itself is a testament to how normalized this has become.

Spam is king

In the space of three weeks, a post on Twitter rallying against spam gained attention, and quickly ballooned into a spam so frequent that Twitter users themselves make fun of the spam.

Metamask, IPTV and "sugar daddy" are terms so corrupted by reply bots, that is now a joke to spam these terms in one tweet to attract the most amount of bots possible.

Twitter users joking about the spam Twitter users joking about the spam

Second fork of the original script

At this point, Twitter is not going to do anything about these campaigns. Some of the earliest tweets mocking these campaigns are nearly 4 months old. We are so far beyond the point that these scams should have been detected by the platform.

A core tenet of Twitter 2.0 was the eradication of spam. Months on, the problem seems to have gotten appreciably worse.

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