Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) urged Elon Musk to ban bots — automated accounts that spam the social media site and are used to amplify content or for coordinated attacks — from the X platform.
“If someone uses Grok, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek to generate a tweet and copy and paste it here, fine, but API posting should be disabled,” CZ wrote in a March 9 X post.
In a separate comment, the Binance founder differentiated automated social media bots from AI agents, saying that the latter was helpful in real-world applications such as booking hotels or writing code without having to socialize with them.
Automated bots are a well-documented problem on X that spam the site and are particularly active in the crypto sphere of influence — plaguing users with scam messages advertising fake tokens, phishing links to malicious sites, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Related: Pig butchering scams stole $5.5B from crypto investors in 2024 — Cyvers
X has a massive bot problem that just won’t go away
The crypto community has been asking Musk to tackle the bot problem since he bought the platform in 2022. However, little has been done to curb the issue.
Musk has proposed several solutions to automated bots, including asking users to register a credit card that would incur a small fee of several cents to impose a cost on new account creation, preventing bot farms from mobilizing armies of fake accounts.
Often, these bots impersonate crypto influencers and industry leaders to peddle fake tokens or redirect users to malicious sites through phishing links designed to steal funds.
AI-powered chatbots have also supercharged romance scams. These scams feature a long time horizon where a threat actor pretends to have a romantic interest in their target to build up trust with the victim over time.
Once trust is sufficiently established, the malicious actor typically requests funds from the target either through feigning financial problems or pitching a fake investment scheme.
A 2023 study from the Network Contagion Research Institute also found that bots were responsible for manipulating altcoin prices by using coordinated posts from multiple bots to artificially pump prices.
Magazine: How crypto bots are ruining crypto — including auto memecoin rug pulls
