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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

#101

Post by paulgb »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #48
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 see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it This is the original, only purpose of retweets, going back to before it was officially supported and was done manually. Showing tweets which have been liked by accounts you follow is a much worse behavior of the app. I like indiscriminately but tweet and retweet very seldomly. There's no feature to save and show appreciatio…

Favorites are useful as an "ack bit" too: indicating to someone that you've read their reply to you when you don't have anything else to add to the thread. I am more hesitant to use them that way these days.

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

#102

Post by MaxBarraclough »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #75
matchbok wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verifying humans is a solved problem.

Please fill us in.

I share your skepticism.

CAPTCHAs are at best a game of cat-and-mouse, and are always open to relay attacks anyway.

You can still verify in-person, and even check documents, but no web company would even consider doing that, even for something like an optional 'fully verified account' tag.

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

#103

Post by andygates »

prolikewh0a wrote: post #46
the-pigeon wrote: post #4

I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it. All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.

I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's not exactly a wild thought. [0] https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...

Human logs on ,sees suspension notice, goes through unsuspension process.

Bot dies.

Those humans are usually very bot-like retweet mills anyway, in my experience. Thou complain'st too much.

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

#104

Post by andygates »

matchbok wrote: post #72
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.

Verifying humans is a solved problem.

Even assuming this is so, what's to prevent BotCo from hiring some humans to click through the process for each bot account?

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

#105

Post by truthwhisperer »

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…

No, I believe you are naive. I strongly believe Twitter plays a love / hate game. Twitter loves to brag with the account numbers for marketing purposes but hates negative attention. The same with fake news. Do you really think they don't know? Sure they do know most of it but the more tweets the better. Everyone loves to receive attention, don't they?. IF you get retweeted or liked by an( allegedly) bot it boots your morale and the likelihood increases that you will come back/refresh to boost your feelings of being important. Although it was a bot you found out later. Doesn't care (anymore) because you are in.

Twitter runs over a thin, really thin line.

Same as Aliexppress or to a (far more) lesser extend some auction platforms with (allegedly) fake or cloned products or products which violates IP. Search for audio books, ip tv, car diagnostics etc. They know, for sure, but need to get attraction by offering goods good to be true. It's a game, Same as twitter ...

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

#106

Post by Strom »

spookyuser wrote: post #88
lxmorj wrote: post #74

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

The problem is so much worse than this now. There are dozens of fake accounts under every one of his tweets and it doesn't even seem like these accounts are trying anymore. Their names are sometimes random strings of letters, and they just change their profile picture to a screenshotted version of Musks. Oh and once you report one of these accounts it can take weeks for Twitter to do anything I also find it so strang…

> They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.

I'm all for Twitter doing more, especially as they seemingly do nothing at all to combat fake accounts. However I'm sure these spammers could just adjust a few pixels on the profile image and a naive block wouldn't do anything.

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

#107

Post by Cthulhu_ »

rtpg wrote: post #63
bredren wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kudos to twitter Kudos? I wouldn't hand over a kudos to twitter. The article triggering this bot ban wave [1] was written by the Times and included behavior analysis that Twitter easily could (and may have) done on its own years ago. Facebook's actions and marketer value has nothing to do with Twitter's own lack of action to prevent infiltration and manipulation of its platform. Twitter's action on stopping spam, b…

He keeps on saying they don't do enough, the times is able to do this despite not even having access to raw internal data I feel like Twitter as an organization doesn't actually care about the problem, just about their image. Why else would they talk about the hate speech stuff and continuously elevate groups like The Proud Boys through their verification process (that also affects their suggestion algorithms). And w…

That's the problem with companies once they go public, and I'd argue once they accept any kind of investment; the new owners have the company by the balls and expect Results, expect the stock price to rise. Twitter's artificially maintained that stock price by not banning their users, because it seems user quantity and growth are far more important metrics that influence stock price than the quality of users.

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

#108

Post by jermaustin1 »

JacobJans wrote: post #69
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.

I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500? If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be no reason to stop the ads.

People are tracking ROI, and constantly testing new targeting parameters to keep eking out a few more points of ROI. A lot of Facebook Ad spend is experimental (especially at that low of a price). There used to be a time when you could get real engagement for pennies each and build up a following of real people based on a few ads then not have to spend anymore and go off your organic growth and audience.

Now the second you stop the ad spend your engagement drops to nothing.

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

#109

Post by pavel_lishin »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #102
pavel_lishin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please fill us in.

I share your skepticism. CAPTCHAs are at best a game of cat-and-mouse, and are always open to relay attacks anyway. You can still verify in-person, and even check documents, but no web company would even consider doing that, even for something like an optional 'fully verified account' tag.

Even something like checking a phone number just means that you're limiting the number of legitimate "bots" or alternate accounts people can have.

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

#110

Post by MaxBarraclough »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #109
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your skepticism. CAPTCHAs are at best a game of cat-and-mouse, and are always open to relay attacks anyway. You can still verify in-person, and even check documents, but no web company would even consider doing that, even for something like an optional 'fully verified account' tag.

Even something like checking a phone number just means that you're limiting the number of legitimate "bots" or alternate accounts people can have.

Indeed, that's a good way to raise the bar.

For small websites, even a completely trivial email check is enough to keep out most spammers.

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