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Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

nytimes.com

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Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#21

Post by gowld »

briandear wrote: post #17
jermaustin1 wrote: post #7

As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.

We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.

What's wrong with even 99% robot engagement is 1% human engagement pays the bills?

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#24

Post by nradov »

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

I think you're overstating the frequency of fake friend requests on Facebook. I'm fairly active on there and usually receive less than one per week. (It was worse a couple years ago.)

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#25

Post by Brushfire »

aphextron wrote: post #6

There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.

They started to do this but then paused all verifications because bots were getting verified.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#26

Post by jermaustin1 »

gowld wrote: post #20
jermaustin1 wrote: post #7

As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.

Surely Twitter would raise their price per click when they increase the average quick quality. Caring about the value per click is ridiculous for a customer -- you should be willing pay whatever rate you think is is worthwhile for the aggregate value of the traffic you see, a number determined by experimentation.

For sure, but I can't control the quality of the click. I'd be willing to pay a lot more per click if there was any realness to it.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#27

Post by Jach »

paulpauper wrote: post #13

the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible to the naked eye.

This sounds like something a bot / Russian troll would say.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#28

Post by radiantswirl »

aphextron wrote: post #6

There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.

Yes. Now that the prestige value of the blue checkmark has already been torpedoed by their various verification fiascos, it makes perfect sense to make the blue checkmark available to everyone because it would also solve a lot of their problems in the advertising department.

Right now clicks on Twitter ads are worth very little because most of the clicks come from fake accounts. But imagine how much clients would pay for "verified clicks" -- clicks from verified accounts.

IMO they should make their ad sales a tier-based cost-per-click model with clicks from verified accounts selling for higher amounts than clicks from non-verified accounts. If theyre smart they'll open up a third tier above "verified" for the twitter-endorsed superstars which will have prestige value again (now that the blue checkmark has none). Maybe a green checkmark would work. Naturally they could sell an ad click from a green checkmark account for even more than an ad click from a blue-checkmark regular ol' verified account.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#29

Post by jlarocco »

briandear wrote: post #18
mkeyhani wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating all bots is not desirable. Many of them are useful and interesting. Eliminating the bad ones with few false positives is hard.

Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.

I'm surprised to see comments like this on HN.

Technically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to tell for sure which accounts are bots and which aren't. How can they tell?

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#30

Post by sidlls »

gowld wrote: post #21
briandear wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.

What's wrong with even 99% robot engagement is 1% human engagement pays the bills?

People don't normally knowingly pay $1 for a penny's worth of value. Think of it like a bucket of apples. If I charge you a price based on 100 real apples and give you a bucket that only has one real apple in it that's basically fraud. Doesn't matter if that one apple is delicious.
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