Did you know that you can summon bots on X (formerly Twitter) with certain phrases and keywords? I discovered this accidentally while looking for an artist on the social media platform, which opened my eyes to how bad the bot problem is.
How Certain Phrases Summon Bots on X
While X Premium was supposed to stop the bot problem on X once and for all, the problem is far from handled. In fact, some bots posing as real users have verified accounts. I stumbled across this when looking for an artist to do a goofy portrait of my cats.
Little did I know that phrases about commissioning or looking for an artist would summon an army of bots to my post and inbox. While some of these accounts may have been real users, many were also automated accounts.
I realized that many of the message requests were bots because of the generic responses I received, as well as certain accounts mentioning that I was likely sifting through bots.
My tweet received 69 replies and I received dozens of message requests. Many of the messages were from accounts that had artwork that didn’t remotely resemble the picture I was trying to commission. They also includedsigns that you’re talking to a bot, like turning around and repeating phrases I had used.
This incident made me realize that certain phrases can result in bots flocking to your account. I did a bit more research into the phenomenon and it turns out that there’s even a name for purposely trying to attract bots—bot yodeling.
After researching on Reddit threads and other posts on X, I tested a few phrases to see if I could recreate the effect. It turns out that certain phrases trigger bots.
The phrases that turned out to be most effective included:
While I didn’t recreate the number of bot replies as I had on my accidental bot yodeling, I did get a peek into the prevalence of bot accounts on X. My use of “Metamask wallet” and “hacked” resulted in several replies from fake support accounts.
When I posted about needing to write an essay, I also received more automated responses from accounts offering to write the essay for me.
One thing I did notice is that my own account was being flagged for spam when using these phrases in a post. This implies that X is aware that certain phrases attract bots and doesn’t want accounts using these phrases for fake engagement. This is probably a good move considering my bot yodeling posts did have much higher engagement and impressions than my normal posts.
There are probably even more phrases that trigger bots on X. And while bots certainly aren’t only a problem on X, when I tried bot yodeling on Threads I couldn’t achieve the same effect.
Hopefully you can use this information to avoid flooding your own replies with bots on X. After all, one of the ways thatAI is making social media worseis that it’s more difficult to tell bots apart from real users. Some of these bots are also part ofcommon scams on X.
