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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

#91

Post by matt4077 »

joshgel wrote: post #60
jackfoxy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

List work well fo that purpose. Many clients also allow imeline filtering, or saved searches (with Boolean queries, and including flags like „people I follow“

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

#92

Post by matt4077 »

The comments here are overwhelmingly misunderstanding twitter‘s action: it will not lower their MAU numbers, where these accounts had already been excluded. Twitter is now just following up by also removing spam accounts from individual accounts‘ follower count.

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

#93

Post by thinkingemote »

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…

You may already have a fake friend in your Facebook friend list. I think your account is marked as a target because of it. It's not something most accounts experience.

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

#94

Post by gaius »

swvjeff wrote: post #85
gaius wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verificatio There’s another solution: the platform is free if you have less than n followers or follow less than n users. Say n is 15 for example. Above that you pay for every tweet. On a sliding scale, say the first tweet/day is 5c, the 10th is $1. They could even ditch scammy adve…

I'm sorry but that is just a horrendous idea unless N is a very high number

Why do you think so? It would solve all Twitter’s financial and social/cultural problems practically overnight

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

#95

Post by ubernostrum »

segmondy wrote: post #32
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…

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 don't see these bots & fake users.

Pop up detail view of a popular tweet from a popular-in-tech person sometime.

You'll probably see, right below it, a reply from an account with identical profile picture and display name to the popular person, but different username, pretending to continue the thread and announcing a cryptocurrency giveaway where you "just" have to send some amount of ETH to their address to "register" or "verify" yourself.

Pretty much any popular Elon Musk tweet will have some kind of "giveaway" impersonation scammer auto-replying, for example. For a while some of the popular cryptocurrency people actually changed their display names to "I'm not giving away ETH", or similar, to try to disrupt the scammers.

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

#96

Post by repolfx »

tropo wrote: post #80

These are not bots. I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot. Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people like their privacy. The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively,…

That may not be Twitter's fault exactly. Twitter is overrun with left-leaning SJW types and why is the W short for "warrior"? It's because again and again these people use whatever tactics they can get their hands on to defeat their perceived enemies i.e. anyone with conservative views.

Most likely there are people on Twitter who make it their mission to report conservative tweeters as spammers, knowing full well that it will cause Twitter to auto-harass them on their behalf. They do it in the hope they can get these accounts shut down and thus "cleanse" Twitter of wrongthink.

This sort of behaviour should be easy to stop, but frankly Twitter's spam team was never that good (just check account prices on the black market). Lots of trivial techniques were never implemented by them.

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

#97

Post by mike_hearn »

sp332 wrote: post #36
pavel_lishin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a super, super simple problem. No offense, but that's incredibly easy to say when you're not the one responsible for doing it.

It might turn into a game of cat-and-mouse, but Twitter just hasn't been much of a cat so far. Finding large bot networks is pretty easy according to the researchers who do it all the time. https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-dema... https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-04…

No, it isn't. It's not easy at all.

The researchers who keep publishing these papers and the patsies in the media who keep repeating them are not identifying bots, in fact they can't know what their own accuracy is because they don't have any way to force verification of accounts. But it's apparent from reading their work that they're usually just identifying humans.

I used to do anti-bot detection and anti-spam work for Google, and have written a takedown of one of these media articles about Twitter bots:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

The paper I studied was riddled with nonsense, fraudulent claims, claims that didn't match their own data, abuse of logic and statistics and massive political bias. It is typical for this space.

This is especially true because real bots (vs the bots that exist in the imagination of political journalists and academics) usually want to sell things. They're quite boring. They aren't engaged in "propaganda". The belief that spammers are spending lots of time and money trying to flood Twitter with political opinions isn't grounded in any sort of reality, and frequently leads to embarrassing claims, like this guy who was pegged as a "Russian bot" but who turned out to be a carpark attendant in Glasgow:

https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll...

These claims about spambots should be seen in the context of a US political campaign in which the losers seemed to be struggling to understand why their preferred candidate lost. The idea that the population has been bulk brainwashed through Twitter doesn't have any basis in psychology or computer science, but is an attractive way to avoid engaging with policy issues.

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

#98

Post by cpeterso »

Sommer wrote: post #81
basscomm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.

There is actually a foolproof way to shut off Liked tweets (and retweets) forever. You can only do it on desktop - but go to Twitter/Settings/Muted Words. In there, make sure "From people you don't follow" is selected along with "Timeline", then individually add the list of common stopwords to your muted words. I listed the ones I use below, you can add more but I've not seen a retweet or liked tweet since doing this…

Clever! But if you have selected "Timeline", aren't you muting both tweets and retweets with your stop words? Twitter's UI makes the "From people you don't follow" option look like it only applies to "Notifications", not "Timeline".

Alternately, you can control whether you see what individual people you follow are retweeting with "Turn off retweets": https://twitter.com/following

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

#99

Post by tolien »

JacobJans wrote: post #70
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…

> We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't. It seems to me that the rational reason to stop an ad campaign is because it stopped enough making money. It's not fake clicks that should be stopping you -- it should be a lack of ROI. I wonder how many people spend huge sums of money on Facebook without tracking their return on i…

While it’s a good point that the “quality” of click should be a proxy (i.e. you care that RoI might be low because of bot visits, not about the bot visits in themselves) rather than an actual measurable, is it not reasonable to assume that if “most clicks are garbage/fake”, they’re not making any money from those and therefore are unlikely to make “enough money”?

I guess that assumes similar cost per click and that your definition of “enough” accounts for a sufficiently low conversion rate.

On the other hand, Facebook (and their shareholders) probably cares that the PPC is depressed by the fraction of non-converting users.

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

#100

Post by Rjevski »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #33
nradov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It may be a 'type' thing. Every time I look at my neglected Facebook account I have anywhere from 6 to maybe 15 friends requests from accounts which have basically no timeline and a "sexy" picture of a 20 something female. If those accounts do have any friends it seems they are all white males over 50 years of age.

I once tried to give Facebook another go and created an account again. It seems like my email was in the meantime leaked to some gambling spam list because 90% of my friend suggestions were fake profiles from around the world created purely to log into a gambling mobile game and (I assume) farm coins/items/etc.

The accounts were obviously fake - they weren’t even trying to hide they were fake, and I actually spent maybe 20 minutes reporting 100 of them, but not only was there an endless supply to replace those I blocked, but the reports didn’t do anything and the accounts were still there.

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