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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#81

Post by duskwuff »

aeternum wrote: post #25
loceng wrote: post #3

Relevant tweet from Elon Musk yesterday: "Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=...

Yes, it's especially apparent when most of the spam is coming from names that are only a few unicode characters away like El0n Musk. Ridiculous that twitter can't flag that kind of thing.

For a while, Twitter would autoban your account if you changed your display name to "Elon Musk". But apparently either they stopped, or the spammers figured out how to evade the filter.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#83

Post by ghaff »

ryanSrich wrote: post #32
jonas21 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option E: Nobody can even agree on what Twitter spam is. Is it bots? I follow a few bot accounts and get value out of them. Is it blatantly promotional content? This actually seems to be one of the intended uses of Twitter. Is it low-quality content? I feel like lots of people earnestly tweet out low-quality stuff, and who gets to judge what's low-quality anyway?

To me it’s the fake accounts impersonating a real company with direct links to malicious websites. These responses always get 100s of likes from other bots, and also dozens of replies from other fake bots to make it seem real. To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working” You’ll get dozens of replies from fake Coinbase support scams.

Well, sure. Anything adjacent to the cryptogrift is going to be a cesspool. I very strongly suspect that the very different experiences that people have relate to who they follow and what they post.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#84

Post by SkyMarshal »

ryanSrich wrote: post #31
jsnell wrote: post #9

Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can't actually judge how good a job is being done. First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the e…

Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam/scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me. The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam/scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.

I follow around 5000, zero spam.

Everyone I follow is computer science or software engineering focused though, so maybe Twitter's algorithm can easily recognize my preference and fill my timeline with related tweets.

Maybe someone who follows a more diverse set of interests will get more diverse tweets in their timeline, more likely to include spam.

Just a guess, dunno for sure.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#85

Post by pmarreck »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #72
pmarreck wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is universally or objectively "offensive"? Is a young attractive woman who is only following me to try to get me to follow her OnlyFans, "offensive"? Is a die-hard materialist atheist, or a strident born-again Christian "protected by the vaccine of God", "offensive"? Is plain nudity "offensive"? Violent photos or movies? Vanilla sex? Hardcore sex? BDSM sex? Bad words? (Bad word filters are easily defeated with c…

But it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts. Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results. I've just realised a potential reason for this: we're seeing a spam-detection algorithm several years down the line from when Twitter started. That's several years of cat-and-mouse, where the spammers have access to much…

> But it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts.

Anything deterministic could be defeated in short order. But yeah, I get that criticism.

> Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results.

My Google search results are excellent. But I also don't block them anywhere in any capacity; you could possibly argue that Google knows me better than any living person, and I am benefiting from that. lol.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#87

Post by habi »

riffic wrote: post #73
habi wrote: post #64

I have a four letter dormant Twitter account. I get about four mentions/replies per day that link to some nondescript crypto airdrop since several weeks. I manually mark each and every such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. Nothing seems to help.

> four letter dormant Twitter account You know at some point Twitter will just arbitrarily snatch your user name up and assign your account a randomly generated sequence. It's been done before without a given explanation. Just keep that in the back of your mind.

How? I'm still 'using' the account for likes and reading stuff from friends, just don't post anything myself.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#88

Post by whit537 »

Anecdote: Troy Polamalu's account (840k followers) has been hacked and scamming people for going on two weeks and his media team can't get Twitter to even respond let alone resolve. :(

https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_... https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polam... https://twitter.com/tpolamalu (scammer took it private)

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#89

Post by [deleted] »

jsnell wrote: post #9

Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can't actually judge how good a job is being done. First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the e…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#90

Post by ALittleLight »

pmarreck wrote: post #65
ALittleLight wrote: post #58

Twitter is also incredibly bad at identifying offensive Tweets - https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html

What is universally or objectively "offensive"? Is a young attractive woman who is only following me to try to get me to follow her OnlyFans, "offensive"? Is a die-hard materialist atheist, or a strident born-again Christian "protected by the vaccine of God", "offensive"? Is plain nudity "offensive"? Violent photos or movies? Vanilla sex? Hardcore sex? BDSM sex? Bad words? (Bad word filters are easily defeated with c…

The page I linked shows examples like two tweets from the same author where tweet A says "Thanks" and B says "Thanks, sista" and B is marked offensive while A is not.

You're absolutely right that finding things "offensive" is a complex, ambiguous, and subjective problem. But Twitter isn't even good enough to be failing at that stage. They are basically marking things offensive at random.

It's like - if you said quantum physics was challenging because of all the math, difficulty doing practical experiments, and changing understanding of the universe - all that is probably true. But Twitter is down the hall eating paste, not grappling with those lofty problems.

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