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

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

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 190 posts

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

#41

Post by donarb »

1337biz wrote: post #40
lorenzhs wrote: post #38

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, bu…

Are you aware that many ICOs give free torkens to people who share a specific tweet or tweet a specific url?

I would say that conversations that need an incentive to retweet are worthless.

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

#42

Post by lazugod »

1337biz wrote: post #40
lorenzhs wrote: post #38

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, bu…

Are you aware that many ICOs give free torkens to people who share a specific tweet or tweet a specific url?

Is this a reason to not block them?

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

#43

Post by douglaswlance »

hellbanner wrote: post #32
jtokoph wrote: post #31

Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?

Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw

>"...hundreds of tweets..."

You realize how few that is right?

Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion?

If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans from countries around the world who comment on USA politics?

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

#44

Post by philipwhiuk »

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…

You mean like how we defederate email servers that have lots of spammers but also lots of legitimate users.

Oh wait no we don't.

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

#46

Post by ianai »

lazugod wrote: post #42
1337biz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that many ICOs give free torkens to people who share a specific tweet or tweet a specific url?

Is this a reason to not block them?

Sounds like a great reason to block them.

Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)

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

#47

Post by TheSmiddy »

jtokoph wrote: post #31

Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?

If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams.

Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"

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

#48

Post by twblalock »

sandov wrote: post #35
hellbanner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw

"Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"

Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #44
r3bl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mean like how we defederate email servers that have lots of spammers but also lots of legitimate users. Oh wait no we don't.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by sandov »

twblalock wrote: post #48
sandov wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"

Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.

Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
Post reply on HN