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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

#171

Post by RandallBrown »

zeth___ wrote: post #153
sincerely wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at some level it's similar to instagram/snapchat stories where you can get brief updates from people you know in other cases entire subcultures that used to exist on forums have mainly moved to twitter, like the fighting game community or somethingawful-style humor then a lot of people like to use it to follow celebrities, musicians or industry leaders

Begging the question: what's the point of instagram and snapchat. Explain this as though I'm a luddite who thinks command line email is better than bbs, irc, and everything else.

The point of them is like any social interaction. To be entertained and connect with people.

I mostly only follow my friends on social media, but I can understand the appeal of seeing in to the lives of your favorite celebrities.

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

#172

Post by nikofeyn »

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.

i find complaints against twitter to be somewhat alien because it is a fairly major source of good content for me. as an example, i just browsed my twitter for a minute or so on my phone and came across a discussion on programming languages, some cool generative artwork, an article on continuations, and i learned of david attenborough's new documentary on bioluminescence.

and i recently went to a design conference where i saw bret victor give a great talk. i found out about the conference on twitter.

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

cookiecaper wrote: post #127
jeffwass wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. If there's one thing I've learned about social media, it's that this totally considerate, natural thought pattern is anathema to the platform vendors. In the real world, you expect a high Signal-to-Noise ratio, and want to reward people who speak less often because their words become more weighty/significan…

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by Bartweiss »

jordan801 wrote: post #170

Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have…

> it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it?

Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)

It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.

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

#175

Post by nasredin »

tedeh wrote: post #87
IIAOPSW wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The people in that one party who have been found by courts to repeatadly disenfranchise certain groups?

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

#176

Post by nasredin »

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?

Millions of real live non-Americans who comment on US politics are not doing it on behalf of a hostile government.

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

#177

Post by nasredin »

staticelf wrote: post #159

I tried to start a twitter account, a few minutes later I got blocked: https://imgur.com/suSH1Qn I didn't tweet anything, just followed some people I found interesting. I don't want to verify my phone number. Fuck you twitter.

I haven't been able to create a Twitter account for over a year now. Home IP.

(Not giving Twitter my phone number)

I think it's deliberate b/c bots seem to be exempt from this phone number requirement.

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

#178

Post by makomk »

nkg wrote: post #94

Hey I run a bot and people love it. It adds value and regularlt triggers conversation. All bots are not about porn and mixtapes!

What gets me is that most news organisations are probably heavy Twitter bot users themselves.

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

#179

Post by nasredin »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #80
cornholio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the technical measures, I think we can all agree something called 'Mastodon' will be safe from spam bots in perpetuity simply by virtue of not having any non-geek users. "Hey Melissa, here's my Mastodon handle, hit me up." "Your... what?" "My Mastodon, it's a federated social network free from any corporate overlord!" "Whatever, freak..."

As opposed to the service that litterally has "twit" in the name? Or the nonsense that has been search engine naming conventions (Google, yahoo, bing, etc)? I think you overestimate the ability for society to accept a name.

OP was talking about the nerdness (think "PGP keys") rather than the name itself.

BTW Mastadon sounds like it's related to BDSM or ED meds IMHO.

"Sweetcheeks, have you heard of Mastadon?"

"I'm not into that dear!"

or

"When the moment is right... Ask your doctor about... Mastadon"

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

#180

Post by Bartweiss »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #103
sandov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude. That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking. So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a pe…

> There is a question of aptitude... the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.

At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?

Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.

First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.

And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.

But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.

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