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Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

bbc.com

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Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#91

Post by will_pseudonym »

_pecl wrote: post #72
jashkenas wrote: post #28

I 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…

I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums. For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for pho…

I'm quite curious about this as a dabbling Twitter comedy content producer/dabbling Twitter developer.

Are there any services out there that sell followers which are less distinguishable from a basic bot account? Or to ask a related question, how much work goes into creating the illusion of authenticity? I'm interested in estimating the likelihood of a given user being real.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#92

Post by andai »

ohnotthatguy wrote: post #58

Anyone on twitter could've told you that. When you're followed by "@hotttladie3" & "hotttladie453892", it's only reasonable to assume there is also an @hotttladie4 through @hotttladie452891. The problem with having a user reporting based plan for acting against fake accounts in an environment where the psychological motivations of using the service, if not to disseminate news, or maintain a closet standup comedian ha…

Which part of that confuses you? If it was the quoting SW part, my understanding is that they used that as a simple source of human language.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#93

Post by chubot »

This has become obvious to me after getting a few blog posts at the top of HN.

I just search for my domain on Twitter, and there are dozens of "people" who do nothing but retweet hacker news articles. They are presumably doing this for some kind of "reverse" reputation.

I'm interested if anyone has any more insight on this phenomenon. Maybe it's as simple as convincing some naive users to follow them with links vetted as high quality.

Examples:

https://twitter.com/bartezzini (123K tweets, nothing but HN-type links and comments)

https://twitter.com/EggmanOrWalrus (15.7k tweets, ditto)

https://twitter.com/MarkBeacham

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#94

Post by [deleted] »

Balgair wrote: post #86
jashkenas wrote: post #28

I 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…

Semi-related aside, but fun: Every April Fool's Day I love to mess with family members. A (hypothetically) good effort:effect ratio I have found is Craigslist: Go into some large city's section (NYC, Austin, Sf, etc) and put up a listing for a 'free xbone' or a 'free PSS1', or something similarly typo'd. Explain that you are giving your kids' Xbone away because of a failing grade, you are moving overseas, your boyfri…

[deleted]

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#95

Post by pavanky »

astrodust wrote: post #47
tristanj wrote: post #10

In their recent SEC filings, Twitter estimates around 5% of the MAUs are spammers or bots. They also estimate they have 317 million MAUs, which when you work it out gives around 16.7 million monthly spammers or bots. Numbers come from their 2016 Q3 filing https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...

I think that's an optimistically low estimate.

Why ?

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#96

Post by will_pseudonym »

wmil wrote: post #87
andai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing why you did it? I've been curious about this for a while.

I've bought fake followers before. It's actually fun. You'd be surprised how much of the "chattering class" will check your follower count before they decide if they should read and respond to your comments. If you enjoy chiming in on national conversations then it's a cheap way to appear prestigious. Of course, you need to be able to argue well enough to not out yourself as some random joe.

I wonder what proportion of the chattering class will pay attention to measures of retweet:follower ratios. It's a good proxy for a fake account.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#97

Post by throwanem »

sjs382 wrote: post #35

There 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 https://twitter.com/superpolice002 https://twitter.com/superpolice003

There appear to be at least 19 of these - possibly more, but I haven't explored the number space save by manual URL editing, and -021 was the first to 404. -019 also 404s; -017 has been suspended. I haven't explored much further because to do so efficiently would almost certainly require the creation of a Twitter account, and I'm not interested enough in this to bother.

Interestingly, #20 hasn't been updated since 26 August last year, and its timeline contains only the two entries "temato" and "mecagoentusmuertos", which are Spanish phrases translating respectively to "I kill you" and "I shit on your dead". Beyond simple unneighborliness, whether they have any significance and what that might be I have to leave as an exercise for the reader, because I have no idea.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#98

Post by andai »

dceddia wrote: post #75
sjs382 wrote: post #35

There 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 https://twitter.com/superpolice002 https://twitter.com/superpolice003

Almost like one of those RSA/Google Authenticator/etc rotating numbers... always 6 characters, seemingly random, somewhat pronounceable. Weird.

What does it remind you of? I haven't used GA.

They're following the format 'bababa', where 'b' is a random consonant and 'a' is a random vowel.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#99

Post by _pecl »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #91
_pecl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums. For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for pho…

I'm quite curious about this as a dabbling Twitter comedy content producer/dabbling Twitter developer. Are there any services out there that sell followers which are less distinguishable from a basic bot account? Or to ask a related question, how much work goes into creating the illusion of authenticity? I'm interested in estimating the likelihood of a given user being real.

I don't really know of any "premium" services; it's just a matter of how much effort the creator puts in. I'm sure there's a spectrum, but I'm not sure how to analyze it/control for it or find more "legitimate" ones.

If you're looking to analyze the legitimacy of a Twitter user it would probably be from the content they tweet. Creating unique tweets is really difficult at scale, so most just retweet or pull from some data source. And if they create enough unique original, valuable content, well https://xkcd.com/810/. Watching people argue with Markov chain generators, incidentally, is one of my favorite things in the world.

There are quite a few services that attempt to determine what percentage of an account's followers are legitimate, but I'm not sure how they do it; probably each a different way.

As an aside, I did watch someone sell a famous author 100,000 twitter followers for $15,000, only to turn around and buy those followers for $100 and take his family to Disneyland.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#100

Post by throwanem »

dceddia wrote: post #75
sjs382 wrote: post #35

There 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 https://twitter.com/superpolice002 https://twitter.com/superpolice003

Almost like one of those RSA/Google Authenticator/etc rotating numbers... always 6 characters, seemingly random, somewhat pronounceable. Weird.

Or like a numbers station. Twitter would make a lot of sense for that, actually.
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