Indian Developer’s Twitter Bot ‘Explain This Bob’ Suspended After Elon Musk Flags It as ‘Scam Crypto Account’

Elon Musk, who has vowed to rid Twitter of bots and scam accounts, has suspended Indian developer Prabhu Biswal’s popular bot account. Biswal ran a Twitter account ‘Explain This Bob’, which was linked to a popular memecoin, BOB. The account was integrated with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, that understood and responded to tweets with a brief explanation when tagged in the replies to the original tweet. Musk, reportedly, is of the belief that this account was manipulating the prices of BOB.

Musk, on June 18, tweeted that the ‘Explain This Bob’ account “sure looks like a scam crypto account,” and the handle was suspended from the micro-blogging site soon after.

Followed by over 4,00,000 people before its suspension, the ‘Explain This Bob’ Twitter bot had jumped into the limelight in April after Musk himself had reacted to a tweet from @ExplainThisBob saying, “I love Bob”.

At the time of writing, BOB is trading at $0.00001942 (roughly Rs. 0.0016) as per CoinMarketCap.

Created in April this year on the Ethereum blockchain, the BOB coin has a maximum circulating supply of 690 billion and it currently has a fully diluted market cap of $13.3 million (roughly Rs. 109 crore).

Now that Musk has flagged the ‘Explain This Bob’ account, the memecoin has recorded a 30 percent drop in its value over the last 24 hours.

In recent hours, #FreeBob has been circulating on Twitter, urging Musk to reinstate the suspended Twitter bot.

As of now, Biswal has not responded to Twitter’s suspension.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,61,900 crore) last year. As part of his main agendas on revamping Twitter, Musk promised users that he would rid the platform of crypto-related scam bot accounts.

Crypto scammers have been flocking Twitter to get a hold of unsuspecting victims and their activities have only risen in recent times.

Last year in May, a report by crypto intelligence firm LunarCrash said that scam activities on Twitter had spiked by 3,894 percent at the time.

The report had also highlighted that the social engagement with spam posts had escalated by over 920 percent on public platforms as of last year.