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Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

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Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#151

Post by vlunkr »

mikedilger wrote: post #127

The bot panic is IMHO overblown. This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing. But the concern seems out of proportion. Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots. Twitter bots are a bit worse than…

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter, but I don't see much bot panic personally. This article certainly doesn't have anything to do with panic, it's just an investigation of one example.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#152

Post by vlunkr »

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.

Well sure, but that's ignoring all the other evidence. Just because someone is holding a smoking gun doesn't mean they've murdered someone, but in certain contexts it might.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#153

Post by wyldfire »

notahacker wrote: post #68
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 a…

> Trouble is, it appears that it's actually mostly real people with otherwise perfectly normal accounts and verifiable identies

Just hypothetical: how do they come up with ground truth when studying this kind of thing? Seems difficult unless you witness the person interacting in the real world.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#154

Post by brewdad »

vangelis wrote: post #65
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!

Is someone who accepts to automated username likely to be contributing anything of value? Human or bot, block and move on seems the best strategy.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#155

Post by vekker »

knzhou wrote: post #95

This is worrying. I already get called a bot or a shill on the regular, and now you can be called a bot for having crooked teeth or "asymmetric ears"? Now I can look forward to internet sleuths scanning my profile picture for imperfections.

Now it just takes a 2nd picture of yourself to prove them wrong, so I wouldn't worry about that (yet?).

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#156

Post by notahacker »

wyldfire wrote: post #153
notahacker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> Trouble is, it appears that it's actually mostly real people with otherwise perfectly normal accounts and verifiable identies Just hypothetical: how do they come up with ground truth when studying this kind of thing? Seems difficult unless you witness the person interacting in the real world.

The BBC actually exchanged messages with some of them. People on Facebook in particular use real names and have profiles on other websites, including places where they and their family work and can be contacted using real contact details. And there's some extent of life history faking that bot creators aren't going to go to just to be one of dozens of people posting 'Good job Boris' a decade after the account's first formed.

Obviously it's more difficult on Twitter when accounts tend to be anonymous, connections are one-way, a lot of activity is retweeting and very little of it is personal photos, and many real accounts have been around for a lot less time.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#157

Post by smhenderson »

notahacker wrote: post #71
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's also the HN way to downvote comments which include complaints about the comment being downvoted though [more so if they speculate the comment is being downvoted due to bots and followup with a request for moderator intervention]. Suspect that's the wider issue here. More generally, political comments are bound to attract some downvotes from people who either support the other side or don't like politics on HN, a…

don't like politics on HN

For me this is it. Now I generally don't downvote unless I see the same person going on and on. But, regardless of how I feel about a particular issue, I just don't think it belongs on HN. I come here to get away from all of that. There are plenty of other places to go if I'm interested in discussing politics. I come hear to talk about tech and science.

I'm not perfect and I'm sure if you trawl through my comment history you can find contradictory examples, but, I hope anyway, they are few and far between and limited to one or two at most in the same story.

My rule of being a good HN user is don't complain about downvotes, don't talk too much, if at all, about politics and read and reread my comment before I hit reply. Am I really making a contribution? If not, hit the back button!

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#158

Post by Kaiyou »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #146
mikedilger wrote: post #127

The bot panic is IMHO overblown. This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing. But the concern seems out of proportion. Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots. Twitter bots are a bit worse than…

You say that the problem is overblown but then go on to talk about the dangerous effects the problem has on discourse. Not only are the bots spewing out propaganda, but as you say they destroy the trust we have in each other which further builds the mindset of "Anything I believe in is true and anything else must be bots". In my mind this makes the bot problem very bad. The problem is made even worse when you have no…

Someone just has to put 10 minutes in, the rest is copy paste.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#159

Post by marknutter »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #146
mikedilger wrote: post #127

The bot panic is IMHO overblown. This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing. But the concern seems out of proportion. Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots. Twitter bots are a bit worse than…

You say that the problem is overblown but then go on to talk about the dangerous effects the problem has on discourse. Not only are the bots spewing out propaganda, but as you say they destroy the trust we have in each other which further builds the mindset of "Anything I believe in is true and anything else must be bots". In my mind this makes the bot problem very bad. The problem is made even worse when you have no…

Or maybe they've never gotten what they feel to be an acceptable or compelling answer.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#160

Post by Buttons840 »

mikedilger wrote: post #127

The bot panic is IMHO overblown. This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing. But the concern seems out of proportion. Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots. Twitter bots are a bit worse than…

It's ironic that it's often the lone opposing voice that is accused of being a bot. Claiming bots is a valid argument against votes, or against a mass of similar comments and opinions. Claiming bots is not a valid argument against the logic of a single comment or opinion. Yet too often it is the lone contrary opinion, often with supporting evidence and logic (since the person is aware they have a contrary opinion), that is dismissed as simply being a bot.

If a solid logical argument comes from a bot it is still a solid logical argument.

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