“If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” wrote Elon Musk in May 2022. “The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow,” he threatened shortly after the purchase closed. A new subscription service, he claimed, would “destroy the bots” with his new “anti-bot bots.” In 2023, the threat seemed to evolve. “We’re trying hard to stop bots & trolls on this platform,” he wrote in July. “Fighting bot and troll farms is hard,” he conceded. “The bot wars continue,” he posted in an August update. January of this year brought a shift in tone: “Bots are the devil (sigh).” In March, more signals of an extended, brutal campaign: “Stopping crypto/porn spam bots is not easy, but we’re working on it.”
The bots have not been defeated — if anything, they have become much more visible across the platform in ads, searches, and, especially, replies. By early 2024, they seemed to be speaking in one voice, with a unified message, in response to virtually any post. They said: “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.”
that spam “my pussy in bio” comment is trending on this platform lmao pic.twitter.com/BbDWnovWdL
They said some other things, too, styled in various formats intended to confound anti-spam measures, but the message was fairly consistent: NUDES IN BIO, PICS IN BIO, ░L░I░N░K░I░N░B░I░O ░, ░B░O░O░B░S░I░N░B░I░O░, and so on. Starting in January, “MY PUSSY IN BIO” spam, after this point referred to as PIB spam, was nearly inescapable on X. Accounts with names like @SusanHall269784 and stolen avatars portraying young women in various states of undress diligently replied to posts about pretty much anything: sports, celebs, war, crypto. Sharing a difficult personal update? PIB. Some breaking news? PIB. Are you, perhaps, a bot yourself? ░P░I░B░.
The flood of horny spam became a meme. There were articles about it. Someone created a PIB cryptocurrency that now has a market cap of a couple hundred thousand dollars. There’s evidence it has cooled a bit, but months later it definitely hasn’t gone away. Musk has addressed it directly — the “we’re working on it” quote above is a reply to a user complaint about the problem — and the joke is now stale enough that one of his companies is using it in PR material:
░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░
Spam is hard. No real platform has solved it completely, and none ever will. Spammers evolve, platforms catch up, spammers evolve again, and so on until the last post is posted and the last user signs out. Individual spam tactics, however, do tend to have short lives, and while PIB won’t be with us forever, it’s notable that it has been with us for so long — a consequence, perhaps, of the near-total elimination of the teams that used to deal with such things at Twitter. Long enough to become a platformwide joke. Long enough to become genuinely sort of annoying even to the users who think it’s funny. And long enough to get some idea of who is posting all that P in all those B’s, and why.
First, a few caveats: X, like Twitter before it, is a fairly permissive platform when it comes to nudity and porn; while it may be unusually visible at the moment, NSFW content has long made up a significant share of total content posted to the site. Its general functional breakdown has perhaps made this content more visible — the site’s search feature turns up a lot of explicit material on common searches, for example — but it has always been there, as have porn-adjacent spammers. Additionally, the rise of OnlyFans, a platform where people can pay for content from adult entertainers and sex workers, means that lots of people are on X (and other platforms) with the human intention of getting strangers to look at nudes found in links in their bios.
At least one source of PIB spam is hiding in plain sight — or, one might say, in Bio. Here is an example from the wild:
Kimberly’s bio does not contain any ░N░U░D░E░S░, but it does include a ░L░I░N░K░ to a domain called Xkos. Xkos links are a common feature in PIB profiles, which often have no followers and rarely exist more than a few days:
Clicking one of these Xkos links will instantly redirect you to another domain called Meetdats. (Xkos is one of many disposable domains that redirect to Meetdats, and Meetdats is one of many very similar destination links.) There, you’ll encounter one of dozens of fake sites: imitation OnlyFans pages, fake porn games with an Electronic Arts logo, a bunch of TikTok-like interfaces with names like TitsTok:
These sites then funnel visitors through a quizzy sign-up process that suggests access to hot singles/nudes/live videos, etc. is just a few clicks away. Typical profile questions (How old are you?) are mixed in with suggestive teases (These women only desire quick sex. Not dating. Do you agree to this request?) before eventually redirecting users one more time.
All the Xkos links lead, through Meetdats, to the same ultimate destination, a “dating” site called Provocative Neighbors, where users enter another horny sign-up flow, after which they can chat — for a fee — with the site’s overly eager-to-please “users,” who live extremely “nearby.”
So far, this is a pretty standard sign-up flow for many online services, including, to pick one incredibly not horny example, LinkedIn: Promise the user what they want, get them most of the way through the sign-up process, and right before giving it to them, hit them with that credit-card form.
It’s after payment that things get strange and rather dark. Provocative Neighbors is pretty honest about part of what it does, at least in its terms of service, which one imagines few prospective customers end up reading:
You also understand that this is a fantasy entertainment Service and that (i) the profiles are fictional and your interactions will be with operators; (ii) we do not conduct background or criminal record checks on users, or verify their identity, and you accept all risk of interacting with people via the Service (on or off of the Service).
To recap: The user checks for ░P░I░B░ on X; the user bounces through a series of redirects and fake dating sites; and the user reaches Provocative Neighbors, somehow decides to sign up, and begins conversing with another “member,” who is in fact a freelance operator getting a cut of the user’s payments to the site. So-called “flirt sites” have been around for a while, luring new users with misleading ads on low-rent websites. Now, a few of them appear to be staying one step ahead of the folks at X, blanketing the “global town square” in pornographic flyers while the world’s richest man shakes his fist at the sky.
Most flirt sites conceal their ownership. Provocative Neighbors, however, is one of many brands openly operated by a small Dutch company called Meteor Interactive, which claims on its website to specialize in “Discrete Payments & Entertaining Platforms.” (At the top of its home page is a banner: “Found us on your bank or credit card statement, and did not recognize it? Read why this happens.” 😬) Over the years, similar inducements from sites run by Meteor Interactive have led users to sites with names like Womenwithsecrets.com, about which one Reddit user posted a truly wild testimonial:
This is a dangerous site and run by known scammers Meteor Interactive. It is a “flirt site” with fake profiles and chat operators. It is $1 per message and you can buy “packages” of credits.
Unfortunately I had figured out this site was a scam a few months before without anything critical happening, but got a little drunk and forgot! I spent $2000 on there, and posted some pics and my phone number. I was contacted by about 10 scammers, (or phone numbers), and sent 3 of them unsolicited dp (dick pics). some of them sent me pics and said they wanted to hookup. Two of them, who did not have the dp, asked for money, one said she “got in a car accident and is in the hospital, I need money to eat”. The other tried to forward me to a bitcoin scam site. One switched to What’s App and has the dp but I chickened out on the hookup when I realized the others were just scamming me. I didn’t pay any of them. I then blocked all numbers. I got contacted next month by a few random numbers via text, one was the wrong number scam.
This is obviously an extreme example, but it reveals something important about the types of businesses for which PIB bots exist. As suggested in the terms of service on Provocative Neighbors, the fake profiles users are chatting with are run by real people, not bots, and Meteor Interactive is, at the very least, not going out of its way to make sure those people aren’t scammers or sextortionists with a bigger prize in mind. (Another PIB-affiliated dating site tells users it’s for “fantasy purposes only.”)
A 2022 BBC investigation into the company found Meteor Interactive BV uses an outsourcing company in Suriname “to recruit, train and staff” overseas workers, some of whom stick to their scripts and collect commissions, while others appear to use customer information gleaned from chats in the service of off-platform scams carried out on Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, and the good old-fashioned telephone. (Calls to Meteor Interactive went unanswered; records acquired from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce suggest the company was founded in 2019 and last reported modest revenue in the hundreds of thousands in 2021, after which disclosure of such information was no longer required by law.)
It wouldn’t be fair to implicate X directly in these scams, which to some degree pester every platform on the internet. Nor is Meteor Interactive masterminding anything here: Provocative Neighbors is just one of hundreds of sites that operate with similar models based on common templates and white-label products that have been available for more than a decade. While these sites do marketing (and spamming) of their own, they outsource some work to other people through affiliate programs, by which freelance spammers get commissions for traffic, sign-ups, or spending. Through a variety of middlemen, Provocative Neighbors pays spammers some pretty hefty fees to deliver sign-ups:
In short, this is why PIB accounts exist: If just one unfortunate X user clicks through — and through, and through, and through — and ultimately signs up for a scam dating site, the site’s owner makes bank, and maybe a freelance PIB spammer gets a few bucks. Stacked-up advertising and affiliate networks are the lifeblood of the broader spam economy (and, with less porn, a lot of online publishing). “A lot of the guys that are running the dating click funnels have been doing it for ten years,” said an adult marketer who goes by SocialManipulator on sites like BlackHatWorld. “Twitter is huge for that, one of the biggest places to convert to dating sites,” he said. “Now it’s just leaving the sex industry and hitting the mainstream.”
One former affiliate marketer, who now sells proxy software that helps spammers evade social-media bans — and who claimed, without sharing their contact information, to “know guys” who do this sort of spam — described to me a fairly unsophisticated and only partially automated style of operation: affiliate marketers hiring “virtual assistants” from low-income countries who use spam-oriented social-media-management software to run hundreds of X accounts at a time. The posts are published automatically — most of the systems “utilize web browsers, and they look very humanlike” — but the accounts take a lot of upkeep and supervision; they need to be run through proxies, post on credible schedules, and avoid obvious detectable behavioral patterns (posting patterns, apparently not so much). They get banned a lot and need to be replaced, which is time-consuming and expensive at scale. As with content moderation by social-media platforms, which rely on armies of invisible contractors to help deal with spam that automated tools can’t catch or parse, there’s probably a bit more human labor involved in PIB posting than there seems at first.
This might not be one huge botnet, in other words, despite how similar its messaging style is. Instead, the former spammer suggested, we’re probably seeing a deceptively small cluster of affiliate marketers seizing on X’s diminished defenses with industry-standard techniques. That PIB posts have become a meme adds additional difficulty — thousands of regular users posting “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░” as a joke makes filtering actual spam that much harder.
SocialManipulator disagreed. “The high clip you’re seeing of posts, that’s probably someone with their own botnet,” he said. “They have a bank of usernames and profile pictures, and they recycle.” It’s unusual for such low-effort spam posts to break through so thoroughly on a major platform, he pointed out, but as long as they still are, they’re cheap, and worth the cost if even a minuscule number of people click through. “Your audience is dumb,” he said. He offered an explanation for the seemingly random deployment of PIB spam under a wide range of posts, often from accounts with few followers: they’re not replying to particular subjects or unusual terms in hopes of finding relevant posts or interested customers, but rather targeting posts which contain ultra-common terms like “the,” at rates low enough to evade bans, at least for a few days.
The last big trend in adult marketing on X, SocialManipulator said, was throwing resources behind bigger accounts in hopes of getting top-ranked replies to popular posts, a tactic that’s been complicated somewhat by X’s new paid verification system, which prioritizes subscribers over other users (there are also plenty of spammers with Blue Checks, of course). PIB spam is a bit of a throwback — a classic spam campaign bolstered by modern tools and slightly different spam economics. “Things like these come and go every six months,” he said. Before “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░,” he recalled, it was “Netflix and F U C K M E.”
“People made a killing off that.”
Dmitry, an adult marketer turned game developer, suggested that PIB-dating-site spam is an amusing but misleading phenomenon — a primitive, low-value play that happens to be unusually memeable. These days, he said, spam on X is all about OnlyFans. More accurately, it’s all about OnlyFans agencies: companies that run OnlyFan accounts that are staffed and automated to talk simultaneously to dozens of users, who are led to believe they are talking to real models, not male operators in, say, Poland. “Every guy has three monitors, three chats at a time,” Dmitry said in a Telegram call. “The girlfriend experience costs $100 a month. There’s huge money in ‘dating.’” It’s an OnlyFans problem overflowing to X, and short of a sitewide ban, it’s not feasible for X to adjudicate which accounts are real on another major platform.
Anecdotally, Dmitry is right: Spam replies from OnlyFans agencies are rapidly crowding out PIB posters in replies across the platform with similarly suggestive but somewhat more humanlike messages that appear to lead to a real OnlyFans account, while PIB posts, though still breaking through, are getting filtered aggressively. Musk’s X, Dmitry said, has proved to be a solid source of raw traffic — that is, new OnlyFans followers — as has Reddit, while Instagram is useful only later down the line for closing the deal. As crude as it looks, all the porny, botty spam on X, he said, “is so visible because it works.”
From the spammers’ perspective, X is just one channel of many, a historically low-return environment that suddenly became a bit friendlier to what they do. Unlike on most of its peers, where users are isolated in groups or by recommendation algorithms, a modest uptick in spam and bot traffic can be quite visible. Bots clearly bother Musk, just not as much as some of the things that might stop them: employing more people, including contract workers from outsourcing companies like the one used by his PIB antagonists, and embracing industry best practices around content moderation, which he recently characterized as a “propaganda word for censorship.” Bots were supposed to represent a visible problem that a new leader could quickly solve. Instead, they’re settling in, slipping into something a little bit more comfortable, and rubbing it in his face.
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