Signs you're following a fake Twitter account • Hacker News Board

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#61

Post by xaxsacsdaffbnk » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

biznickman wrote: post #40

I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.

It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach.

Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway.

And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#62

Post by jsjddbbwj » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

vertis wrote: post #54

thefreeman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider people don't agree with your opinion? I am anti Trump but not everybody is. Also there are bots on all sides of the political spectrum as evidenced by the article you are commenting on which dealt with an account pumping Bernie.

It's a well-reasoned respectful comment though. It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments.

Here it is okay to downvote if you disagree.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#63

Post by brenden2 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

Twitter has become so low quality that I don't even bother looking at it anymore. The interactions tend to be extremely negative, the ads are annoying and irrelevant, and most of the people who get famous tend to be celebs or narcissistic pseudo-intellectuals who just repeat whatever the populist opinions are for their audience. I've found/met some interesting people though Twitter before, but these days I find it's not worth the noise to find that signal.

Twitter seems to want to resist any changes that would make the metrics look bad, but those changes are necessary to make the platform good. For example, they could offer a paid tier with more options to block/filter low quality content. They should also make a decision to either allow all bots, or ban them outright, and also make it easy for end users to tell whether an account is a bot or not. They should scrap the blue check marks and just offer a "twitter gold" badge for anyone willing to pay $5 a month. I don't really care if Twitter has checked anyone's identity, I just want to know if the person tweeting is a human or not.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#64

Post by krapp » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

vertis wrote: post #54

thefreeman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider people don't agree with your opinion? I am anti Trump but not everybody is. Also there are bots on all sides of the political spectrum as evidenced by the article you are commenting on which dealt with an account pumping Bernie.

It's a well-reasoned respectful comment though. It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments.

>It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments.

That's the way people want HN to be, but not the way it is.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#65

Post by vangelis » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

non-entity wrote: post #4

Easiest way I've found to spot bots on Twitter is username patterns where both the handle and display name are similar or the same with 1 or 2 words (often a first and last name) and a random number. For example JohnDoe127474 . For a more realistic example: I just went to the first trending semi-poltical topic and this was the first bottish account I found (the tweet itself is pretty benign): https://twitter.com/Elsi…

Congrats, you've found someone who accepted the autogenerated username!

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#66

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

xaxsacsdaffbnk wrote: post #61

biznickman wrote: post #40

I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.

It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach. Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway. And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.

Available evidence doesn't support your claims.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#67

Post by vertis » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #64

vertis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a well-reasoned respectful comment though. It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments.

>It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments. That's the way people want HN to be, but not the way it is.

Perhaps I should say "That's how it used to be".

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#68

Post by notahacker » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

petargyurov wrote: post #9

The biggest sign mentioned in the article is the insane number of tweets since the inception of the account - surely this must set off some alerts on Twitter's backend? I know that this is an extremely difficult problem to solve and that they probably ban accounts in waves but with something as obvious as this you'd think that the ban could/should come more swiftly...

IIRC someone did some analysis on political accounts that did nothing but high volume retweets supportive of a particular cause. Problem is, quite a few of the identified probable bot accounts turned out to be real people that had just become infatuated with the cause...

[Related phenomenon: the UK PM gets lots of obviously bot -like almost identical 'good job Boris' comments on his Facebook account. Trouble is, it appears that it's actually mostly real people with otherwise perfectly normal accounts and verifiable identies: the whole thing probably started off as a forum campaign to rally the appearance of support in an election buildup, but ended up being mostly people who think it's a funny meme. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-50218615]

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#69

Post by krtong » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #66

xaxsacsdaffbnk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach. Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway. And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.

Available evidence doesn't support your claims.

I cant say I agree with this. Every person should be able to to discern a fact from an opinion, know how to pick an argument apart and identify logical fallacies, and if people can't then getting rid of bots doesn't solve twitter's disinformation problem if people are just as good at propagating nonsense as bots.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#70

Post by Seenso » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

vertis wrote: post #49

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #17

> His two front teeth (red box) are different shapes and sizes. Which would be entirely normal for a guy from Manchester. My two front teeth are different shapes and sizes too. We don't really do "cosmetic dentistry" here in the UK, certainly not to the extent it's practised in the US.

And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on (though perhaps not to the extent in this article).

> And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on (though perhaps not to the extent in this article).

Yeah, I was surprised the article made such a big deal about that. My ears are also a little asymmetrical, and Stephen Colbert's [1] are very obviously so.

[1] A famous American comedian with a nightly talk show.