People seeking Park Fire news on X instead encountered spam and porn. ‘This is dangerous’
As the Park Fire spread across parts of two California counties Wednesday night and Thursday morning, so too did a proliferation of automated accounts overtaking the fire’s hashtag on X, formerly known as Twitter.
With bot accounts clogging searches using the “#ParkFire” hashtag, users took to X to share their grievances over the inability to find critical information about the 120,000-acre fire — California’s biggest to date of 2024, which was just 3% contained as of Thursday evening as it burned across Butte and Tehama counties.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
By early Thursday afternoon, the search function seemed to be working properly for #ParkFire, no longer inundated by bot spam that came at the same time law enforcement officials were expanding mandatory evacuation orders for residents earlier in the day.
Though residents have been using X to search for information on what is the state’s largest fire this year, some said they encountered accounts using the hashtag to share spam and porn.
“Locals can’t get up-to-date critical information,” one user wrote. “This is dangerous.”
Users implored the company’s owner, Elon Musk, to remedy the issue.
“Unable to use the search function for timely news on the #ParkFire because bots have taken over the hashtag,” one user wrote. “Do better @elonmusk.”
Due to the backlog of spam, other users said they were looking elsewhere.
“Twitter is so broken I have had to go on Facebook to get the latest #ParkFire updates as porn bots have taken over what was being used as an emergency tag,” an X user wrote.
Users’ grievances come a little more than two years after Musk announced his acquisition of Twitter in a $44-billion deal in April 2022.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said at the time. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2024 at 1:19 PM with the headline "People seeking Park Fire news on X instead encountered spam and porn. ‘This is dangerous’."
