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Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
171–180 of 267 posts
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#172I 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…
There's an angle that hasn't been explored that ought to be: a lot of news and political commentary websites used to run their own comment systems for articles or use pseudonymous services like Disqus, but these were overrun by "trolls" and spammers.
Many then switched to Facebook, presumably hoping that the "Real Name" policy would improve things.
The interesting thing is that clicking on many of the Facebook profiles on these comments leads to curiously sterile profiles, with a few friends. Some of the most vehemently pro-Trump comments seem to have originated from these accounts, especially on certain Conservative sites during the Republican Primary season.
Facebook seems to have no interest (or ability) to clean this up.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#173I 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…
A few years ago, probably 3, it was very very easy to build your network of bots. Today is more difficult (those accounts don't last that long). I personally bought thousands and advertise my websites, you could get 10,000 visits per day in 1 day old sites. I can't imagine what you can do with money and a few people in your organization.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#174Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#175The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#176Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#177Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#178Related research paper, "The 'Star Wars' botnet with >350k Twitter bots":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445289
And another paper covering the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445295
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer probably isn't satisfying - pranks on friends, it's cheap and is usually a good laugh. 20k followers for around $10 found on a blackhat SEO site. 19.5k of which are still around after about a year. You could totally use it for business purposes too - as a really shitty form of advertising or just to make your popularity look higher. I doubt it'd be too effective, but hey, it's cheap.
I see... Could someone buy 200k for $100?
I'm not sure, but I expect it gets harder to hide the fakes at larger scales.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could NYT quantify - through experimentation - the value of a bot army as the "story"? For instance a Tweet with 100 retweets is substantially more likely to generate additional retweets / be shown more by Twitter's algorithm / etc vs. a tweet with 10 retweets. And scale that up! Easy to build an experiment and quantify even on a small level for NYT.
They could have tweeted, paid for a bot army to retweet, then reported on that.
And then gotten criticized for being unethical....