Spam was a serious and growing problem before the major providers got serious about filtering. For now I just report clickbait feeds as spam and hope for the best.
Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
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Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#32I found it interesting that a Member of parliament on twitter had hundreds of obvious bot followers. I presumed he was buying 'popularity'. Maybe more sinister. Lots of them very recent
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#33Oh, it's a lot more than 350k.
http://socialpuncher.com/top-100/how-many-primitive-bots-fol...
Percent of 1 level bots is 59,33%.
The total number of unique level 1 bots is 310,537,272.
Almost 60% of Twitter Top-100 audience is a cheap poor-quality imitation.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#34I think this story is getting more coverage than the one from a few months ago that showed that, for instance, both Clinton and Trump had millions of fake accounts following them: > Per eZanga, 4.3 million—or 39 percent—of Trump's more than 11 million Twitter followers as of August came from fake accounts while the other 6.7 million are actually real users. And for Clinton, 3.1 million—or 37 percent—of her more than…
http://socialpuncher.com/business/the-synchronized-fake-race... Twitter audience growth of the presidential candidates in 2016
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#35There was a "Ask HN:" post about Twitter bots the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497235
Strange that these bots aren't spammy but are posting every minute or two. I wonder what they're for...
https://twitter.com/superpolice001
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#36This seems like a pretty straightforward thing to identify. I remember when the NYT's story, "The Agency", was published [0], some of the fake accounts it had mentioned were still up. Even though the accounts in that story were actually populated by real people, the sockpuppetry was pretty easy to identify. One: the accounts' past tweets right up until they started spreading the news about the fake U.S. disaster were…
I wonder how many of those Facebook spam comments are entirely real accounts that've been compromised (access tokens and/or logins). Would make them even harder to detect.
You don't even need that. You just need a bunk chrome extension or local spyware and they can easily redirect the occasional FB comment through a remote infected node which is a real person, likely logged into facebook, of which they likely have access to hundreds of thousands. Let the person change their FB credentials all they want to try to get out of that.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#37Huh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted. It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need t…
I get just as much if not more telemarketer/phishing on my cell as my landline. Just one data point, for sure, but is there any reason to think landlines are less secure than mobiles?
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#38I would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into. Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any…
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Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#39On the same topic. I think he might have discovered the same botnet. http://sadbottrue.com/article/51/
To me, it seems like a set of QA/test accounts for Twitter to do load testing and whatnot.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#40Huh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted. It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need t…
My cell phone's the same way now. Maybe one in ten calls, at best, isn't phone-spam. And that's with being on the Do Not Call list. I've been trying to figure out a way to do without an actual phone (except maybe a burner on the off chance I need to call 911) as a result. Text is by far the more valuable side of my phone plan, but mostly because everyone wants to use it for auth these days (I could switch to another messaging service for actual communication with people I know)