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

91–100 of 190 posts

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

#91

Post by spdustin »

aphextron wrote: post #74

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 upvoted because I assume you meant that verification would be optional. I believe Twitter is actually moving toward that solution.

I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.

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

#92

Post by lokedhs »

kzrdude wrote: post #20

> (“jakten” means “hunt” in Norwegian) I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish. Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.

It's odd that they mentioned Norwegian at all. Nothing wrong with Norwegian of course, but the researchers are Swedish, and "jakten" means "the hunt" in Swedish just like Norwegian.

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

#93

Post by lokedhs »

goerz wrote: post #73

I'm not sure I understand the point. So they identify bots. Then what? How can one get rid of these accounts?

They report them. And then nothing happens because its in the interest of Twitter's business to not do anything about it.

To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users.

I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.

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

#95

Post by westurner »

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…

Mastodon is a federated system like StatusNet/GNU Social.

So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?

I find that hard to believe.

ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).

Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.

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

#96

Post by dbetteridge »

aphextron wrote: post #74

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 like this idea, a simple tag on an account that says "we have verified this person is real" and a filtering mechanism in the UI would do wonders.

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

#97

Post by unclebucknasty »

douglaswlance wrote: post #43
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

>"...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?

>Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion?

Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact.

But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence?

Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president.

>If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans

False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.

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

#98

Post by JonasJSchreiber »

aphextron wrote: post #74

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 couldn't agree more. If there are more accounts than people in a region, you know you have robots registering. They need to employ better captcha and verification for registering new accounts.

I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.

I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

scottmf wrote: post #89
retox wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by JonasJSchreiber »

scottmf wrote: post #89
retox wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I want to downvote the person you replied to and upvote your comment. HN apparently doesn't work like that so I'll stick with a single upvote :)
Post reply on HN