Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 116 posts

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

#51

Post by rspeer »

mcny wrote: post #47
bilbo0s wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created ..." Oh my, that definitely should be filed under: "Be Careful What You Wish For" I suspect such a change as that would end up annoying the living you know what out of most every user on Twitter. They should let YOU configure YOUR OWN account to see everything. But I'd be really hesitant to do that for every account on Twitter by default. That just…

I'm OK with this being OPT IN, hidden behind three layers of warnings. I just want it to be an option.

It is an option, a terribly obscure one, if you use Twitter's search interface to read your tweets instead of your home timeline.

I have this URL bookmarked as "Twitter classic":

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...

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

#52

Post by rconti »

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…

My mother and father have each had 'fake' clone profiles of them created a few times.

Occasionally I get friend requests from some random dolled up woman, perhaps once a month.

... that's it.

I wonder what causes one person to get a large number of bogus friend requests and others not. I'm guessing it has to do with who your friends are, and how many?

I'm around 1000 FB friends +/-, but the vast majority of them have been on Facebook for a VERY long time, so perhaps they're less likely to be friend scam accounts?

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

#53

Post by slig »

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…

> Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage.

It's possible to block friends requests from anyone except friends of friends.

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

#54

Post by citrablue »

sidlls wrote: post #30
gowld wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

However, since it's auction based, if you were getting real clicks, the cost would be significantly higher than $1. I'm not sure how it's a penny's worth of value, given that the price includes the market's best guess as to the value of the mix of valid/fraudulent traffic.

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

#55

Post by notatoad »

bilbo0s wrote: post #44
segmondy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

"... I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created ..." Oh my, that definitely should be filed under: "Be Careful What You Wish For" I suspect such a change as that would end up annoying the living you know what out of most every user on Twitter. They should let YOU configure YOUR OWN account to see everything. But I'd be really hesitant to do that for every account on Twitter by default. That just…

You can make Twitter display all tweets in chronological order, they just call it a "list". Instead of following people, add them to a list. When you view the list you'll see all the tweets from people on that list, in chronological order. And as a bonus, no ads!

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

#56

Post by Jach »

dang wrote: post #40
Jach wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please don't break the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This is a particularly toxic variant of that poison, and it's important not to use it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess I forgot to add "/s", which I didn't think was against the guidelines (just low value).

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

#57

Post by saint_fiasco »

wild_preference wrote: post #38
Brushfire wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I saw one of those Ethereum scambot dopplegangers on a high profile tweet that was verified. Really looked awful and definitely caused more damage since people are trained to trust it.

Any hacker that manages to get the credentials of any verified user can just change that account's name and picture to that of a famous person for easy impersonation.

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

#59

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.

Non-sarcastic reply since original one was flagged:

It's sometimes rare to see people bring up the chance of false positive identification, though two comments did in reply to another downvoted comment. In the replies to popular tweets are a mix of replies from real people, replies from bots, replies from real people behaving in the way a bot does, and replies from mixed accounts where people sometimes tweet themselves and sometimes use a tool to automate tweets. One account I saw just accused others of being bots, their twitter history was filled with such accusations. I'm pretty sure they weren't a bot though based on the other tweets, and I doubt there's a tool just for that... Maybe people need to be accused of being a bot by a non-bot (sarcastically or not) to think about the chance of false positives more often? But it's frustrating to see congratulations as if the hard problem of identifying accounts that need to be banned (with some bad bots being a special subset of that) has been solved.

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

#60

Post by joshgel »

jackfoxy wrote: post #43
segmondy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

Exactly this. My other beef with twitter is a more sophisticated way to filter my timeline. I mean something that would make sense to a programmer, not the typical user friendly useless thing.

yes! I really wish it had this. I have several interests. Sometimes I want to see the news, sometimes read about tech, sometimes medicine, whatever. It all just runs together and makes me less productive instead of more...
Post reply on HN