Trending topics and word salad

Why bother with coherent sentences when random nonsense is just as effective at getting noticed by The Algorithm™?

thousands of posts doesn’t always mean thousands of people are interested

The “trending topics” feature has long been a cornerstone of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and attempts to manipulate this feature are a longstanding tradition that remains alive and well today. For example, the cryptocurrency token $GTAI appears to have recently trended almost entirely due to a large number of short posts containing a handful of entirely random words. Although these spam posts could have easily been made to appear more legitimate by using a large language model to generate text composed of complete sentences, the individuals behind this particular spam operation opted for a lower-tech approach for reasons unknown.

Important caveat: the list of trending topics displayed by the X/Twitter trending algorithm is tailored to each individual user, so you almost certainly won’t see the exact same list of trends as I do at any given time, even if we connect to X from the same country and use the same language. The $GTAI trending topic discussed in this article was shown to me on a small account that I do not post on and primarily use to study spam, and this usage pattern may have influenced the algorithmic decision to show me this particular trend.

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$GTAI trended on X on March 7th, 2024. Scrolling through reverse chronological search results for the topic revealed an almost endless stream of nonsensical posts, with $GTAI invariably positioned at the end of each post. As mentioned earlier, these posts are made up of random words with no coherent sentence structure or apparent meaning. Many of the accounts that participated in the trend show signs of being hijacked, such as a lengthy period of dormancy followed by a sudden shift in focus from personal topics to cryptocurrency spam. Although it’s possible that these posts were made manually by a group of humans rapidly swapping between accounts and typing random nonsense, the far more likely explanation is that these posts were created by automated means.

this is not the first spam rodeo for many of these accounts

Some (but not all) of the accounts that participated in the $GTAI trend have previously been involved in similar spam efforts. The most frequently seen of these is spam containing the hashtag #LionCoin and mashups of random Portuguese words posted on July 12th, 2023, but other previous spam campaigns (generally cryptocurrency-related) show up as well. At least some of the past efforts at generating trends via this type of spam appear to have been successful, such as the aforementioned #LionCoin.

#LionCoin trended on July 12, 2023, the same day the spam containing #LionCoin was posted

Unfortunately, given the removal of the free API and various other recent changes to X, it is difficult to map out the entire network of spam accounts or even say with any degree of accuracy how many accounts are involved. One can, however, estimate — assuming that the 2920 $GTAI posts were mostly spam and that each spam account posted one $GTAI post, the spam network likely consists of at least a couple thousand accounts. It is probable that ongoing observation would reveal many additional attempts by this group of accounts to force cryptocurrency-related hashtags and topics to trend.