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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

#51

Post by stuartd »

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.

Well, they're obviously not the only criteria, as the text you mention was immediately preceded by "Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts... "

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

#52

Post by bigiain »

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…

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...

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

#53

Post by jeffwass »

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’m a total Twitter n00b.

But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.

So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b.

I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)

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

#54

Post by beedogs »

ianai wrote: post #46
lazugod wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'd be happy with that if we also got rid of Facebook and Reddit.

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

#55

Post by beedogs »

sandov wrote: post #50
twblalock wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes: let's just go back and re-teach everyone. That is surely an easier solution to implement than banning Twitter bots.

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

#56

Post by always_good »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #47
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!"

And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed.

Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots.

It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers.

Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.

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

#57

Post by IIAOPSW »

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"

The alternative solution (don't let people that stupid vote) is too impalpable for society right now.

Even if just 10% of people are that dumb, 10% is more than enough to swing an election.

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

#58

Post by Cyph0n »

beedogs wrote: post #54
ianai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'd be happy with that if we also got rid of Facebook and Reddit.

What's wrong with Reddit?

If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks.

But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN...

Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.

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

#59

Post by itomato »

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?

As a system, Twitter is easy to "game", if your goal is to spread information.

It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets.

There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats.

Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts.

Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.

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

#60

Post by jeffwass »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #47
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!"

Do people actually fall for this?

I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon.

But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?

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