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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

#141

Post by Thlom »

cicero wrote: post #83
aaachilless wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think I see any ads using Tweetbot. I may also miss some features, but don't really care about that. I like that my Twitter feed is just a stream of tweets.

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

#142

Post by eksemplar »

aaachilless wrote: post #68
bigiain wrote: 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.

Isn’t it typically the comments that are shitposts?

Trump posts and the comments look like:

“Liberals are the worst” “Trump is a god”

“Send 5 ETH to receive 10ETH”

Obviously Trump is a great shit poster himself, but virtually everyone with a lot of followers end up with nothing but stupid as their replies.

A Danish politician recently commented on the problem by saying that we’ve alway had village idiots, but social media let them lose.

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

#143

Post by realusername »

retox wrote: post #76
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 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.

They could use Google Captcha and create two kind of verified account, you don't necessary need an ID.

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

#144

Post by TangoTrotFox »

zeth___ wrote: post #75
bigiain wrote: 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?

Its size has attracted a number of companies or 'significant' individuals that provide regular updates on activities exclusively through this platform. For instance SpaceX, Elon Musk, NASA, etc have chosen to use Twitter as a primary PR platform.

The reason these companies use it as a PR platform is obvious - there's a lot of users. I can't even fathom why it has lots of users though, at least not without mocking the state of society today.

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

#145

Post by tajen »

eksemplar wrote: post #142
aaachilless wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t it typically the comments that are shitposts? Trump posts and the comments look like: “Liberals are the worst” “Trump is a god” “Send 5 ETH to receive 10ETH” Obviously Trump is a great shit poster himself, but virtually everyone with a lot of followers end up with nothing but stupid as their replies. A Danish politician recently commented on the problem by saying that we’ve alway had village idiots, but social…

Are you by any chance a believer that half of the political spectrum is wrong? When people talk about trolls, it always seems like they talk about people they just don’t agree with, and conventional media is a more comfortable space for them because all the right wing doesn’t have the possibility to speak. You may consider the It’s-the-Russians disorder is not a disorder, but that only works if you want to live in a bubble where the other 50% citizen shut up.

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

#146

Post by neotek »

realusername wrote: post #143
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.

They could use Google Captcha and create two kind of verified account, you don't necessary need an ID.

CAPTCHA is an entirely pointless way of verifying humans, you can buy human-powered CAPTCHA solves for less than $1 per thousand.

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

#147

Post by TangoTrotFox »

21 wrote: post #67
always_good wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twit…

> And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much. So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.

The sort of person that would check transaction histories is not the sort of person that's going to believe, even for a second, that "@e10nmussk" asking for people to send them money is genuine. I would expect all those transactions are genuine. There's a lot of naive people in this world and they seem attracted to Twitter like flies to a light.

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

#148

Post by realusername »

neotek wrote: post #146
realusername wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could use Google Captcha and create two kind of verified account, you don't necessary need an ID.

CAPTCHA is an entirely pointless way of verifying humans, you can buy human-powered CAPTCHA solves for less than $1 per thousand.

Ah sorry then, I did not know it was that cheap :/

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

#149

Post by sleepychu »

tajen wrote: post #145
eksemplar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it typically the comments that are shitposts? Trump posts and the comments look like: “Liberals are the worst” “Trump is a god” “Send 5 ETH to receive 10ETH” Obviously Trump is a great shit poster himself, but virtually everyone with a lot of followers end up with nothing but stupid as their replies. A Danish politician recently commented on the problem by saying that we’ve alway had village idiots, but social…

Are you by any chance a believer that half of the political spectrum is wrong? When people talk about trolls, it always seems like they talk about people they just don’t agree with, and conventional media is a more comfortable space for them because all the right wing doesn’t have the possibility to speak. You may consider the It’s-the-Russians disorder is not a disorder, but that only works if you want to live in a…

I don't think your parent makes judgement on the value of any political position. Trolls here just refers to people who are shouting without contributing to the discussion.

What they're saying is that once any user has a sufficiently large following the replies to their tweets with any signal are lost in the noise of unrelated political rantings (both sides) and scam bots hoping to take advantage of the exposure that replying to big users has.

These groups both manipulate the rankings. Political ravings are upvoted by the similarly inclined politicals. The bots work in swarms to favourite their own posts and reply with "Wow, worked for me, thanks!"

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

#150

Post by bad_user »

zeth___ wrote: post #75
bigiain wrote: 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 the only social network that I tolerate.

And all the people in the software industry that I want to follow are on it.

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