X users celebrate crackdown on ‘plague’ of AI-led reply spam as InfoFi platforms seek alternatives

For months, the experience of engaging on X (formerly Twitter) had been marred by a relentless deluge of AI-generated reply spam, often promoting dubious crypto schemes, linking to fraudulent external sites, or simply flooding trending threads with irrelevant boilerplate. However, in the last week, users have reported a significant and immediate reduction in this digital nuisance, leading to widespread celebration across the platform.

The spam operation, which users quickly dubbed the ‘plague,’ utilized sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) to monitor high-traffic posts and rapidly deploy hundreds of automated, generic, yet contextually plausible replies. These replies were designed to siphon engagement and push promotional content, drowning out genuine interaction and severely degrading the signal-to-noise ratio on the site, particularly in threads concerning finance, technology, and entertainment.

While X management has not issued a detailed public statement specifically outlining the enforcement mechanism, observers and data scientists suggest the sudden cleanup is the result of tightened API restrictions, enhanced machine learning algorithms aggressively targeting repetitive reply patterns, and stricter enforcement policies against accounts identified as bot networks, even those that had been grandfathered into the X Premium ecosystem.

This crackdown, while overwhelmingly welcomed by the general user base, presents an immediate challenge for the burgeoning ‘InfoFi’ (Information Finance) and decentralized Web3 ecosystems. These platforms heavily rely on X’s open, viral reply structure to distribute news, coordinate decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) votes, and execute large-scale marketing campaigns that require rapid, wide distribution.

Many InfoFi projects tolerated, or even tacitly encouraged, the use of semi-automated accounts to ensure their messages permeated critical conversations. Now facing a significantly more sterile and moderated environment, these groups are scrambling to find alternative, reliable communication and distribution channels. Early trends suggest a potential shift towards decentralized social platforms like Farcaster, or a return to proprietary decentralized networks, forcing a major reassessment of digital marketing strategies reliant on X’s organic reach. For the average user, however, the consensus is clear: the ability to engage in actual conversation has finally returned.

Source: X users celebrate crackdown on ‘plague’ of AI-led reply spam as InfoFi platforms seek alternatives