Ashley, Emma, ​​Elsie: who are these bots disrupting your public Spotify playlists?

Users of Spotify
are “harassed” by mysterious robots that sabotage their public playlists. Who are these bots and how do you stop them?

Ashley, Emma, ​​Elsie… Common female names in the United States that easily pass for “normal” users. And yet, these are the names of mysterious bots that have been invading and disrupting Spotify users’ public playlists for the past few days. They create the dissatisfaction of Internet users and musicians.

Who are these bots and what do they do?

Spotify’s collaborative playlists are designed to allow platform users and their friends to select and share songs in real time and in public mode. But many Internet users have complained that bots have been disrupting their reading list for a few days.

These accounts have fun deleting songs and adding others by artists “unknown” to the public to promote them. The tiktoker and musician @jw_francis managed to spot the presence of these spam accounts and reported it in a video where he exposes funny playlists that feature his own music.

The video received many reactions, including comments from other independent musicians who were also victims of these bots. ” It happened to my band’s playlist, and each time we had to delete the songs they had added. They also removed all songs from our playlist older than 7pm! replied @bbnaluu. Another user comments: Here’s another reason to ditch Spotify. This is a huge invasion of privacy! »

What solutions against these bots?

Normally, Spotify is able to detect and remove spam accounts, but these bots evade detection by rendering their activities normal, down to their very ordinary female names.

Not to mention that the very nature of collaborative playlists is to be open to all Spotify users and their friends. This makes it difficult to prove that an account is malicious.

Spotify is aware of the presence of these accounts, but has refused to remove them. An update allowing creators to change editing permissions in their playlists would be considered. But for now, the only solutions against Ashley, Emma and Elsie are to manually remove the songs they add, and change its public settings.

Source: Mashable