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

theintercept.com

81–90 of 190 posts

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

#81
post #75
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Honest question: what's the point of twitter?

I tried to make Twitter work for me by only following people I am genuinely interested in. (Founders, CEO's, etc) but even after that I am not engaged.

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

#82
In the early days of twitter, Trust&Safety was considered the second-lowest team on the totem pole of engineering career advancement possibilities (sorry Internal Tools aka Developer Productivity).

I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations.

Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.

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

#83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is it for some reason not a viable solution to just stop following people who shitpost? Or does Twitter push random users' posts at you? I ask because I've been circling around Twitter for a month or so, but if you can't isolate yourself from public tweets, I'm definitely not going to jump in.

It is certainly viable. I follow an interesting group of users and unfollow anyone who becomes problematic. There are some "Promoted" tweets that are essentially ads, but they are easy to ignore if not interesting.

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

#84

This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.

Human / not human is probably worthwhile, but a ton of twitters value would go away if everyone had to use their real identity to post.

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

#85
post #75
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Honest question: what's the point of twitter?

I enjoyed the social aspect of it. Learning from new people. I use Manton Reece’s service Micro.Blog now and love it.

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

#86
post #76

This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.

I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.

That escalated quickly. Are you sure if Israel wanted to pin an extra-legal assassination on you, they couldn't do so already?

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

#87
post #57
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"

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.

I have a pretty good idea on who is going to decide which person is too stupid to vote in such a society — I mean, you must be pretty stupid in the first place to even consider voting for anyone else than the most powerful party/government, right?

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

#88
post #75
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Honest question: what's the point of twitter?

Twitter is great for following popular figures and companies. Users can receive news briefs directly from these sources. Often I will read internet journalism about tweets I read a day after I read them on Twitter.

Being on Twitter is like being at an on-call press conference with all of your subjects of interest 24 hours a day. It's actually pretty bad ass. It's not all heavy with prose. It's heavy with meaning.

Unlike my Facebook network, which is almost entirely composed of friends and family, my Twitter network is composed of prominent figures, projects, and companies in which I am intensely interested

For example, I am an American and I have a passing interest in politics. I follow the President of our Great Union, who is an avid tweeter. I prefer to interpret the news as it happens, through my own unique filter and perspective. Later, I read how others interpreted it. It can be a fun contrast and I prefer to be ahead of the punch, so to speak.

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

#89
post #76

This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.

I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.

Perfectly sane reason for not signing up with Twitter.

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

#90

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…

This is a great effort. I wrote about this at the end of January (https://research.satnam.co/2018/01/30/scammers-impersonating...) and was working on a script last month that did the same thing but I was searching the Streaming API for specific keywords that I knew were triggers for their tweets. I set-up a Twitter account to also identify and report these scammers accounts. The problem I was having was I did not account for the variety of currencies that were being utilized, so I had to write new regexes for the different address types. By then, they had switched up tactics and I hadn't followed up on it since.
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