Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 267 posts

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#231

Post by mcintyre1994 »

pluma wrote: post #203
fsttx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profil…

While I wouldn't dismiss the chance that some of these people are fakes I would like to point out that despite being a techie (if not because of it?) I barely use Facebook anymore and if I hadn't been registered for a long time my Facebook profile would also be pretty barren. I also always had a policy of only "friending" people I know personally and privately. The only purpose of Facebook for me is keeping up with t…

There's also privacy settings - unless Facebook have wiped all my settings since I last checked (they used to do this lots but don't seem to any more) you're not going to see basically anything without adding me. That's probably distinguishable from a fake if you look closely, but similar enough that those accounts might look the same if you're just taking a quick look at each account.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#232

Post by akjainaj »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #90
ceedan wrote: post #25

- messages being posted only from Windows phones The smoking gun. What real person still has one of those. Disclaimer: I owned a Nokia Lumia 920 for > 2 years.

Maybe the OAuth token for a popular WP app got leaked, and now anyone can authenticate with it?

All OAuth tokens, even the official ones, are leaked at this point. Google them.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#233

Post by zump »

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

Modern Numbers Station.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#234

Post by mike_hearn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #117

The question this sort of thing leaves me with is "Why does {Twitter/Facebook/Google} permit this? What are they getting out of it?" Its pretty clear what the bot guys get out of it, pay to promote services, pay for followers, etc. They can monetize "fame" through the robotic horde. But as this article and ones before it point out, these networks are generally quite easy to spot. So why not take them out? It probably…

They don't "permit" this. I used to work on anti-bot technology at Google and we put a lot of effort into fighting botting, in particular on Gmail. We were quite successful at the time. Bot controlled accounts went from being a problem that was threatening the viability of the service to being fairly trivial. I don't know what it's like these days.

Anti-abuse teams tend to be relatively small. We aren't talking hundreds of engineers here, we're talking like maybe 10-15 engineers. When you look at the relative effectiveness of different networks, you can be comparing something as trivial and random as whether one or two people happened to figure out a good strategy or not. There is no need for conspiracy theories.

The costs of accounts on different networks is a reasonable proxy for effectiveness at bot fighting. My favourite site has always been this one:

https://buyaccs.com/

From a quick check it seems Twitter is getting better at it. Prices used to be more like in the low $20/k range. Now the low end accounts are $45/k and if you want PVAd/profiled it's up near $90. Compare to Gmail where the price is more like $280/k. Or Facebook EN accounts, $120. Good to see my old colleagues doing such a good job!

In the case of Twitter, my view is that their relatively low performance on botting is a side effect of the whole social justice / campus politics movement. I heard from a friend who works there that their focus was switched almost entirely to fighting human abuse like people being nasty to each other, political extremism, terrorism, etc. If you remember, just a few years ago Twitter was being attacked in the media for being filled with trolling and nastyness. So of course that became their priority. Anti-botting took a back seat.

Nowadays there's suddenly a bout of anti-Russian hysteria. Suddenly bots are in focus again. There are conspiracy theories about botted accounts being used to convince people to change their political positions. Having worked in the industry for years I am deeply skeptical about this. I never once saw bots being used for political ends or anything even approaching it. There is a lot of disinformation out there about Russia right now from western sources, and a lot of paranoia that doesn't seem to be justifiable.

I'd guess RT does far, far more to create pro-Russian support than anything happening on Twitter does.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#236

Post by rmetzler »

fnord123 wrote: post #223
rmetzler wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to mention Reddit bots who copy user content to make karma and gain influence on Reddit. There is one kind that mostly copies images with karma in the 1.000s and repost them with the same title a year or two later. To appear more legit these bots also copy user comments and post them to /r/askreddit in threads that are similar named but most often not exactly the same as the original post. I suspect that often…

And bots that take twitter videos and post a streamable mirror? It seems similar enough that it would be on topic. How do they sit with you? As videos on twitter don't seem to work at all, it's a great service, imo.

There are "I'm here to provide a service" bots which are almost always named appropriately. Like a reddit bot that links to IMDB or Wikipedia or converts between metric and imperial units.

The bots or sock puppets or fake accounts I mentioned don't provide any other value than copying old front-page material and repost it a year or 2 later without any indication that this isn't their own material.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#237

Post by arturmakly »

_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…

so you are paying $75/1k accounts?

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#238

Post by eriknstr »

SoundCloud is full of fake accounts. I get a couple of new followers every now and then and it feels like 95% of them have mentions of "buy followers". I always report spam bots whenever I spot them on SoundCloud, Tinder, Facebook and Reddit, so though I only have very few followers on SC I think all of them are real people at least. It is very important to always report spam bots and other types of disruptive fake accounts and I wish that everyone did. If everyone did then it would be less profitable to run such accounts and then there would be fewer of them and we would be bothered much less frequently.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#239

Post by alphydan »

In a time where bots and AI are all the rage, it begs the question: Are some bots on twitter more useful and insightful than actual people?

I remember a twitter bot (name escames me now) which would crawl pastebin and tweet updates when passwords / DBs were leaked. It had lots of followers (security researchers who found it very useful).

Most humans on twitter are boring and waste people's time with youtube style comments. Most bots are spammy and waste time too. Why not allow both and let people decide who they follow/ban?

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#240

Post by KirinDave »

tritosomal wrote: post #216
KirinDave wrote: post #141

I'm just amazed at this entire series of threads. "Gosh, who knew violating social network ToS by proxy and creating massive false consensus networks was so easy?" Everyone. Everyone should know. We're watching this terrible trend rip apart the entire social proposition of the internet after spending 2 decades trying and finally achieving buy in. And here y'all are, hopefulls for a digital economy cheerfully defraudi…

What stuns me is that we all know these junk accounts are easy to make, purely by how easy it is to make our own accounts. We know they cost nothing to us, and so, any time we find a website and approach it as a total stranger and create a cheap account quickly, we know other strangers are capable of the same. So, clearly no substantial population is buying into fake news. Those that do, are likely also paying hundre…

I don't think the general population realizes how easy or effective automation is in these contexts.

But also those ads are more about delivering exploits than actual product sales.

Post reply on HN