> For a mere 80000 USD I could have a verified bot army with 10000 accounts drowning out a lot of legitimate conversations

That’s a different problem. The parent is referring to the cheap high-volume spam/scams that have proliferated every corner of the free internet. These only work because they’re extremely cheap. There’s a reason your email inbox receives 10,000x more spam than your physical mailbox.

If a scam can't even make $8 per account it's pretty much doomed to failure anyway. Think about it.

Paid spam accounts are removed as well, which you left out of your analysis.

Buying an account doesn't give you un-suspendable account.

All spam detection techniques are applied to paid accounts and they are removed as well.

This not only raises the cost but difficulty.

Just having money is not enough. Detecting 10+ payments from the same credit card is trivial.

There aren't infinite amounts of valid credit cards or Apple accounts to be used for verification.

Spam detection at Twitter is horrendous. Search results for many crypto and stock ticker symbols (or cashtags like $SOFI) are deluged with Discord links for shady trading groups endlessly trying to rope in paid subscribers. If you select "top" search results, you'll see much less spam but stale tweets. "Latest" yields tons of spam. They've been tweeting with the same phrases like "don't miss the next move in a few hours" and "top analyst price target" for years, presumably because it's never been a priority to get rid of them.

In a sense it’s legitimizing bots as long as they pay