- Identical spelling mistakes reveal use of fake accounts to boost Twitter profile of Binance, and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao.
- Three separate accounts used identical phraseology when prasing the Binance cryptocurrency exchange.
- Twitter has attempted- and failed – to crack down on bot accounts in the past.
The founder and CEO of Binance was exposed in an attempt to illegally boost the Twitter profile of his cryptocurrency exchange using Twitter-bots.
Binance, or “Binace”? Twitter Bots Can’t Spell
Several ‘commenters’ on a recent post by Changpeng Zhao (known as CZ) all made the same spelling mistake – confusing Binance with ‘Binace’.
Seen below, the spelling mistake drew attention to the fact that two comments were 100% identical.
Two tweets with identical phrasing – and mispellings – made it clear a bot was in use. | Source: @bPafundi, Twitter
Another identical tweet (seen below) was found afterwards, taking the toll of identical mis-spelled bot-posts to three.
Twitter has attempted to crack down on users employing spam-bots for personal and/or political purposes. The social media giant changed its rules in 2018 to discourage bot accounts, and has the freedom to ban any accounts they deem have made “identical or substantially similar” posts.
Head of Binance, CZ, was celebrating a recent article by Bloomberg which referred to Binance Coin (BNB) as the “best performing cryptocurrency”.
The fake posts would have been completely unidentifiable were it not for the fact they were repeated. Scanning through the rest of the positive replies on CZ’s post begs the question: how many bots are in use?
I See Fake Accounts – They’re Everywhere!
Close friend of Changpeng Zhao, and fellow cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Justin Sun, has also been at the center of Twitter-bot controversy in the past.
Sun acquired 2.1 million Twitter followers in little over two years – the largest following in the cryptosphere by far. Yet an analysis of Google search interest for his flagship cryptocurrency – TRON (TRX) – reveals a glaring discrepancy.
Ethereum (ETH) attracted more than triple the Google searches TRON did across most of 2019. Yet Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin still has just over a third of the Twitter followers of Justin Sun. That’s despite Ethereum being created almost four years before TRON.
Both Justin Sun and Binance’s CZ reacted positively to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recently unveiled plans to create a decentralized social media protocol. If Dorsey’s plans went ahead, would that make fake accounts harder to spot, or easier?
This article was edited by Sam Bourgi.
The post appeared first on CCN
