So, as the title begs, did I win? Did I beat the Bot Police of X? Did I prevail in the great "prove you're a human" slugfest of early 2025? I dunno. Maybe. Kinda. Sorta? For those who may not know, the "site formerly known as twitter" has joined many other large companies and/or websites in trying to purge "The Bots", the automated hack tools which infect cyberspace like a bad case of the ick. Virtually every site has at least some form of "Captcha", that greets you like an older relative at a Family Reunion ("Heyyyy there stranger! Long time. no see! I remember when you were only this tall!"). It's become so ubiquitous that you almost take it for granted. ALMOST.
Those of us who were born in the days before dial-up? We know better. We were already adults when "the web" meant a shiny AOL CD and a reliable telephone line with a phone jack and poles and even "real live humans" as "Operators" on the other end, who would do such things as "look up phone numbers for you". (yes, that was a thing. They'd even read off the physical address associated with that phone number too!). We remember an internet when the biggest threat we faced was being on too long and possibly missing a call. Yup! We faced hard decisions - browse this new frontier called the "interwebs", OR be able to make and receive telephone calls. But you couldn't do both at the same time! Nope. We didn't have that kind of technology yet. Another threat we faced was something everyone takes for granted now - "cookies", as in "this site uses cookies", only back in our day, we didn't get any fancy warnings or notifications about cookies, and most of us thought they were some form of "geek-speak" that only folks employed in Tech Support needed to understand.
But, "the times, they are a change-in" as the old dinosaur anthem goes. And Bots are everywhere, hiding under every stich of HTML code, waiting to steal your personal information before the actual web hosts do. And owners of big Social Media Platforms like "the site formerly known as twitter" don't like that. At all. The Elons and the Marks and the Jacks of the world haven't yet figured out how to make bots pay them any money like we good old fashioned humans do, and that's a problem. You can't be The Boss/King of The World/Richest Dude on Earth! if you ain't earning the dough every second of every hour of every day. So the Bots have got to go. At least the "bad bots" do anyway.
Oh yes, you see, in the great digital frontier known as "online", there are Good Bots and Bad Bots. Who knew? The good bots work for search engines and domain hosts, crawling over every inch of every page of every site, categorizing and filing and sorting and occasionally making coffee. Well, maybe not that last part. But, yeah, the good bots help to make Google reliably tell you which website has the recipe for the dish that tastes just like your long defunct favorite chain restaurant used to serve. The bad bots, however, .....well, if you're on Social Media, (and I know you are), YOU KNOW what the bad bots are. They're the "follower" with a posed picture of a chick in a bikini and a BIO listing such handy information as "I like long walks on the beach" and "I'm a Capricorn" and "Follow me on OnlyFans".
So, Mr. Musk of "the site formerly known as twitter" fame, has declared WAR on the bad Bots of X. "There's too many Bots!" he stated, as he funneled billions of dollars into "Artificial Intelligence", which is NOT a giant, super smart BOT, or so we are told. Yup, the Xpert, Wizrds of Smartz at X have unleashed a huge, automated phone answering service equivalent upon the bad bots infecting their platform, and the results are astounding..........astoundingly bad. As in - utter failure. As in - real, live, living breathing human beings such as yours truly here are falsely and maliciously accused of being a bot, while fake, unliving, non-human bots are left relatively unmolested, free to follow you and me and share their love of all things Crypto and Porn and Dating Site hell. And, as many of you already know (enough already! they scream from the rafters), I have been battling the Bot Police of X for several months.
So, back to the opening salvo. Did I win? Well, the definitive answer is a resounding MAYBE. Here's what I can tell you so far. Firstly, if you don't pay any money for your X account, you don't get any "support" for any issues whatsoever. NONE. You're on your own. Get banned for no reason? Too bad. Get locked out for no reason? Oh well. Being stalked, harassed, doxxed? Sucks to be you. No money, NO HONEY, no questions. no exceptions. Oh sure, there's an account on X called @ support. But, it's just there to give you an outlet for your anger. You can tweet it, twit it, post it, scream at the top of your lungs at it - it doesn't care. It's an unmonitored account. The lights are on, but nobody's home. THERE ARE NO HUMANS AT @ SUPPORT. You heard it here first.
Secondly, if you DO pay money for your X account? You get a nice little checkmark beside your account name, a nice $8 entry on your next credit card statement, and the ILLUSION of actual "Support". You don't qualify for real, live, human beings @ X with the basic, low budget, $8 per month checkmark. You get the Automated Telephone Answering Service Equivalent Bot for support. And, you reach it by contacting @ Premier. And when you contact @ Premier via "DM", you get an automated response from the Artificial Intelligence, which gives you a meaningless "case number". Why meaningless? Because there is no "case". Your problem is just that - YOUR problem. The BOTS DON'T CARE. You'll never need to reference that case number, because you'll never hear back from the Bots unless you continue to DM @ "Premier", which will simply be additional replies to your original DM, which already has the useless case number in the thread.
But, that didn't deter me. Oh no. I'm persistent. Like a rash. Why? Because I was (and "is") and am, INNOCENT. I never have used any automated posting tools or purchased any fake followers or violated any TOS or X Rules EVER. And after being on the platform for over a decade, virtually problem free, I simply was not (will not) stand for being locked out every 24 hours because some automated AI program decides I'm engaged in "suspicious" or "unusual activity". So, what did I do (I pretend someone asks)? Well, I kept replying to @ Premier's ridiculous automated responses with demands for a real, live, human such as myself to review my account. And I kept at it until the Big AI of X Support basically said "don't call us, we'll call you". In other words, it gave up. It politely asked me to stop asking them for a human because they were not going to provide me with one. But did that work (I pretend someone wondered)?
Well, maybe. But another thing that I have done, is stopped posting as much on X. Rather than my usual flurry of morning news links, I posted them here. Rather than posting news articles directly from the "share" buttons, I've been copying and pasting the links into posts. Maybe some of that has made a difference. I'll never know. But one last thing I did, which maybe, JUST MAYBE the AI picked up on, was that I told @ Premier the simple truth - if they kept locking me out, once every 24 hours, for no damn good reason, I was going to STOP PAYING. And out of everything I have tried, that may very well be the one thing the AI Bot Detection Police have been programmed to understand - No Money, No Funny!
So, I'm on basically a solid week or so of not being locked out of my X account. So far. But, this whole stupid, meaningless affair has left me scarred. I won't misuse and misappropriate the term PTSD for what I have. But I will say - X is no longer as much fun for me. I cringe every time I go to open the site on my PC or the app on my phone. Each time I log in, I'm expecting to see the X version of the BSOD - the dread "Your Account Has Been Locked". And then having to take the insulting "prove you're a human" test. And then seeing that THEY unfollowed me from everyone I follow. And then seeing the automated "atta boy!" messages with each subsequent post ("Keep it up! You're doing great!"). After the first TWENTY times, it gets a bit old. And then you start to wonder - why am I doing this? This is not my job. I'm not being paid to undergo this humiliation. To have a plucking BOT accuse me of being a BOT, and then having site support BOTS give me automated messages that "they" have done everything THEY can do and there is nothing more THEY can do. And all the while, I'm thinking "who is THEY?" there is no THEY at X. There's Elon, a handful of lawyers and accountants, maybe a tech or two for the Big Time Talking Head Influencers Who Schmooze With The President who need hand holding when they only got 100,000 reposts and expected more. But for us lowly no-name humans? There's only BOTS.
And That Is Absurd. Thanks for stopping by. See ya on X
Disclaimer: As you may or may not know, I've been in the midst of a serious disagreement with the Support Bots of X, who about a month or so ago, started falsely accusing me of "unusual activity". After more than a decade of being on the platform, I can honestly assure you that the only "unusual activity" on my account was/is X deciding that I need to be locked out, approximately once every 24 hours, until I "prove that I am human". Fortunately for all involved, not the least of which being my Wife and kids, I AM. But I have no idea how long this will continue. So, in the meantime, I suggest you bookmark this site, and follow me on Truth as well. It's a bit different than my X account, but
you can find me here.
P.S. - I am not an "affiliate" or a "Sponsor" or a "Paid Influencer". I earn no money from this. Whether you click a link or take a drink, I get nothing and want nothing, beyond knowing you may have been enlightened. If you liked my curated links, a site share would be cool ;)
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