Twitter Turns to Blockchain Technology to Prevent Scams

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has presented a possible solution to the issue of Twitter fraud at a Congressional committee Wednesday, stating that the social media platform is currently investigating the application of blockchain technology to create decentralized trust and enforcement mechanisms.

The Twitter ecosystem is saturated with scams, fraud and impersonation, and the Twitter cryptocurrency community, in particular, is a prime target for scammers, with account impersonation fraud so common that many notable industry personas have updated their profiles to reflect the fact that they are not giving away free crypto.

Dorsey highlighted the importance of blockchain technology in combating Twitter fraud during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing question session, led by Rep. Doris Matsui, focused on content moderation, privacy protection, misinformation and purported bias against political conservatives on Twitter.

Blockchain technology, states Dorsey, is currently being considered by Twitter as a solution to the issues of trust and enforcement, stating that current investigative efforts have "Gone as deep as we'd like just yet." Dorsey maintains a strong presence in the blockchain sector as the CEO of Payment processor Square, which recently implemented cryptocurrency buy and sell features in the Square Cash mobile app.

Research published by Duo Security, a unified access security and multi-factor authentication platform, reveals the sophistication of cryptocurrency Twitter scammers-identifying massive scam botnets consisting of over 15,000 bots that siphon crypto away from users by spoofing cryptocurrency exchanges, celebrities, news organizations and verified accounts.

Interestingly, Twitter scam bots are surprisingly complex-exhibiting three-tiered, hierarchical structures that consist of scam publishing bots, hub accounts that lend credibility to individual bots and amplification bots that like tweets to artificially elevate its popularity.

Statistics available from EtherScamDB demonstrate how profitable Twitter scamming can be.

To date, over $5 million has been sent to wallet addresses linked to Twitter scams, with some truly tragic examples.

The Ethereum ERC725 protocol is a self-sovereign identity management solution that delivers decentralized identity management-integrating a similar solution could see scam accounts on Twitter disappear entirely.

Neither Dorsey nor Twitter has made an official announcement regarding the integration of blockchain solutions.