Redditors Accuse Amex Of Sponsoring Anti-Crypto Tweets

A recent Reddit post which became very popular saw Redditors accusing American Express (Amex) of sponsoring anti-crypto tweets. The post was started Tuesday, October 16, after users found a tweet on Twitter that was posted by @tictoc and allegedly promoted by Amex:

“The cryptocurrency industry is using more energy than all the world’s electric vehicles, researchers say”

Redditor Alexsazz’s threat was titled “Anti-crypto propaganda… promoted by American Express” and it was posted on Bitcoin. At the time of this report, the post had over 4,500 likes and 508 comments. The tweet that sparked the controversy had more than 42,000 views and links to a multimedia article that uses sources from Bloomberg to affirm that cryptos spend too much energy.

The tweet comes back to one of the oldest Bitcoin argument: does it spend too much energy or not? Both sides have arguments, so you might just pick your preferred side. The article covers the energy spending of mining and its mining process.

On the post, Redditors called the tweet “propaganda” and were arguing about how American Express sees cryptos as its competitor so the company was promoting content against them.

Is The Controversy True?

The original tweet still exists and you can find it below. It has only 14 likes and 10 retweets, though, meaning that it was not very impactful. Cointelegraph investigated the matter and it affirmed that it could not find any links to a possible promotion by American Express.

The cryptocurrency industry is using more energy than all the world's electric vehicles, @BloombergNEF estimates pic.twitter.com/n2BA68zyLo — TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) October 10, 2018

However, the media outlet has affirmed that insiders from Twitter have confirmed in private for them that the tweet was promoted but they could not identify the sponsor. At the moment, Amex has not stated anything about the issue.

It looks like there is no way to know whether the tweet was promoted or not unless American Express publicly responds to the allegations but that will hardly happen as most major financial companies do not respond to Reddit threads.

As there is always the possibility that the image was simply fabricated, it is impossible to know for sure whether the post itself was not propaganda against Amex. Because of this, we simply do not know what is the truth behind this controversy. Until this is found out, this will remain a mystery.