Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that a bit thorny since most of the content is copyrighted...
Most on porn sites is, though.
Most on the internet too. Every image meme and reuploads of other images are basically also copyright violations.
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
101–110 of 173 posts
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#102Okay, who puts time on the Y axis of a graph? Honestly.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#103I have a (maybe) interesting twitter related anecdote. 5-6 weeks back I went to the twitter website and I was greeted with a login screen. I couldn't remember my password and didn't feel like finding it so I went off to look at other sites. That happened a few times, until I went back and POOF, I am automatically logged back in again. I've never seen a site un-invalidate an auth token before. Cool beans.
I had something similarly weird with amazon. I got a new iPhone and on iOS Safari I needed to sign in to all my accounts. Except for some reason Amazon recognised me with one-click enabled. I never used one-click to buy anything before and accidentally bought a kindle book while browsing the site. More strangely, when I went to turn off one-click in my settings I was forced to log in. So I could one-click buy without…
FYI Kindle purchases can only be made via one-click. I hated when Amazon forced me to enable it to get a copy of Traction.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#104I am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
To name but a few reasons off the bat:
1. Twitter is selling content feeds to TV news networks. With enough bots out there your tweet may very well end up on TV.
2. It counts for SEO. I once met a guy in 2010-ish who was into casino SEO. He was running a network of ~150k FB/Twitter accounts to promote articles that quoted the oddball news outfits that quoted his clients' press releases.
3. Some people actually read what's going on on Twitter. In particular journalists and swaths of opinion leaders. See any late night show, really, for ample Twitter coverage.
4. Some people with tons of followers occasionally retweet garbage memes on Twitter, including racist videos tweeted by white supremacist UK groups that turn out to be fake.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#105Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on Twitter. I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used. I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That'…
For sports, it's the fastest way to get news - if you follow the right people.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#106Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
I would love to get copies of your script if you wanted to email a link. I'm not so interested in bots but I am interested in social network analysis.
I don't know about Tumblr wrt porn - my impression is that there's a lot of sexual material there but that it's community-driven rather than commercial, partly due to the demographics of its user base.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't. Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included. Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles,…
"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles" "Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake." You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem. "Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression" Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why…
While I don't pretend to have been party to internal FB conversations when certain decisions were made, as an advertiser, FB has definitely done some things to significantly erode that trust over the years.
For starters, encouraging advertisers to spend money to build up an audience with the assumption they could continue reaching that audience much like email, only to throttle organic reach to zero was pretty bad.
There have been other things such as being extremely...generous...with the definitions of how some ad metrics are defined and what defaults are presented. Even as an experienced advertiser who knows to look for those things, the lengths to which some of it it is buried is astounding to the point of it being hard to trust that it wasn't intentional. And the recent lawsuits around such things shows I'm not alone in that feeling.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#108Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
Isn't that kind of expected? The rate of real users pretty much matches the rate of real users on websites.
Would also be interesting to run similar analysis in FB, I'd expect similar rates here.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#109I am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
Because of advertising fraud, because of media manipulation, because of violations of campaign and fraud laws, because of foreign enemy powers influencing internal affairs of the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, and other states.
The problem being that even if you yourself don't view or access Twitter, it is influencing, and largely for the worse, the world in which you live.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't an argument about whether social media is a net positive. This is about people , and whether Twitter protects its users at risk, or builds a system which just begs for government to request their real names.
Would it be possible to do a 1-time verification, and then throw away the data? Twitter needs to see a driver's license or passport once, not keep a scan of it.
> not keep a scan of it
What prevents me from using the same id in bot accounts then? Verification implies they have to keep some form of personal identification.