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Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

theintercept.com

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Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#21

Post by kbenson »

seviu wrote: post #18
hinkley wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.

I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.

> Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.

Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#23

Post by rhizome »

westurner wrote: post #14
carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

I have no opinion on its ability to replace Twitter, but the federated nature of Mastodon means that an instance can disconnect from the instances that are hosting spam accounts, much the same as many instances have disconnected from servers that host racist and alt-right communities and accounts.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#24

Post by r3bl »

westurner wrote: post #14
carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon.

There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.

Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.

It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#25

Post by downandout »

The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios."

If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#26

Post by CM30 »

johnc1231 wrote: post #10
obblekk wrote: post #6

This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).

I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats

I suspect their big problem is more that their site is too big for the moderation staff they have at the moment. Identifying bots is easy for people sure, but it's hard to automate with AI and hiring people to proactively hunt out and shut down bots is expensive.

Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#27

Post by cornholio »

westurner wrote: post #14
carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

Regardless of the technical measures, I think we can all agree something called 'Mastodon' will be safe from spam bots in perpetuity simply by virtue of not having any non-geek users.

"Hey Melissa, here's my Mastodon handle, hit me up."

"Your... what?"

"My Mastodon, it's a federated social network free from any corporate overlord!"

"Whatever, freak..."

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#28

Post by mtgx »

obblekk wrote: post #6

This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).

If only Twitter didn't obliterate the "third-party market" that existed in the Twitter ecosystem in the early days. I imagine we'd be seeing all sorts of solutions against bots by now, especially in third-party Twitter clients.

But no, Twitter had to "take matters in its own hands" and "control the ecosystem". Much good that brought.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#29

Post by abhishekjha »

downandout wrote: post #25

The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios." If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.

I have an account like that. I just retweet and like stuff sort of like a public bookmarking system. I just go through them when I get enough leisure. I wonder if having a profile photo would help avoiding false positives.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#30

Post by freehunter »

r3bl wrote: post #24
westurner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon. There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules…

And we all know Reddit is free from spam and bots.
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