Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 173 posts

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#131

Post by kelnos »

CPLX wrote: post #27
scrollaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just porn. My account with ~150 followers was, out of the blue and within a week, followed by a dozen different "startups". Every single one of them follows tens of thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back. It's pathetic.

I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. That seems to be an example, at least somewhat, of using the platform as intended. If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.

I see random accounts occasionally following me, and it's clear that they're just casting a very wide follow net to see who will follow back, presumably to get their readership up. To me, that's spam, no question about it. Even if it's targeted. (Targeted spam is still spam.)

I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too much of the platform, but... it is what it is.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#132

Post by kelnos »

wambotron wrote: post #26
tinbad wrote: post #2

It's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just the right thing to do. [1] https://t…

But why does it matter to a general user if there are real or fake users behind twitter accounts? It makes no difference to me whether I have fake followers or not, as I'm not going to be forced to see anything they're posting (or not posting). I can just ignore them and follow who I want. It seems like it only matters from an investment stance.

I care because I get a notification when someone follows me, and I want my notifications to be a source of data with a high SN ratio. I want to notice that a someone has followed me so I can click through and decide if I want to follow back. If it's a bot account, I've just wasted my time, because I never want to follow bots.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#133

Post by bduerst »

scrollaway wrote: post #17
tinbad wrote: post #2

It's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just the right thing to do. [1] https://t…

> It's just the right thing to do. That sounds like a sweeping statement with little forethought when you're talking about a platform that enabled protests in dictatorial regimes. Step back here: Fake users, sold by the thousands to give credibility and a megaphone to whoever shells out money: bad. Identity verification: A solution with many consequences to be weighed before jumping on the bandwagon. And dictatures a…

That's a different problem though. What if you could do identification that didn't involve giving someone your passport?

Authentication adds a potential cost-of-reputation to social media content that you post, which in turn may raise the value of the content. If there were a safe, secure way to do it, then why not?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#134

Post by ErikAugust »

chatmasta wrote: post #129
ErikAugust wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have spent several years working on a product ( https://www.rapidcrowd.co ) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off. For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features. However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have…

How is what you are describing any different from sponsored tweets?

You don't have to follow a bot, so you will never see their tweets in your timeline. You can't remove a sponsored tweet from your timeline.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#135

Post by kristofferR »

lugg wrote: post #115
kristofferR wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most on the internet too. Every image meme and reuploads of other images are basically also copyright violations.

This doesn't mean a company Tumblr's size can ignore it. Reddit, Google, Facebook, et al all need to consider these things as they operate. I'm not saying they can't skirt the laws a little bit and get away with it, all I'm saying is they need to have awareness.

Nah, they just need to be vigilant about DMCA requests.

Due to the Safe Harbor rules in US copyright laws they don't really need to remove copyrighted content proactively. There's tons of subreddits exclusively dedicated to piracy that they don't care about.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#136

Post by notahacker »

MBCook wrote: post #117
ErikAugust wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have spent several years working on a product ( https://www.rapidcrowd.co ) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off. For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features. However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have…

When I first joined Twitter a few years ago I tried the ‘search near me’ feature a few times. Weather bots. For any city within 100 miles of where I am. Plus bots posting job listings. Plus companies posting those same job listings. There was basically no signal to find, it was all noise. The few ‘legitimate’ ones I found were from local PD/FD. I think they just need to ban all bots/automated postings. Or make them f…

But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing. And being partly an RSS substitute is surely part of Twitter's business model these days. Not suggesting that many of these accounts weren't still absolute garbage, but the signal/noise ratio isn't always great with obviously human-run accounts either.

The other issue is that the distinction between a bot and a human isn't clear-cut: there's plenty of shades of grey in between something which spits out badly-scraped listings all day and an actual human having noncommercial conversations with Twitter friends. It's more classifying what's bad behaviour (using the pornbot tactic of mass follow/unfollow to attract attention even if you're a human marketer tweeting actual content, and even if you haven't written a script to do it) and what's perfectly acceptable automation like tweet schedulers that could use some work

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#137

Post by kakarot »

fwip wrote: post #71
chimeracoder wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn. ...what? Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users t…

The porn bots have only gotten worse, though. In 2012 it was at least mostly human-run porn blogs, and they didn't start following you if you were just a regular blog.

That's true and it needs to be dealt with, but OP definitely is speaking outside of their domain of knowledge because Tumblr was always drowning in porn. OP didn't specifically mention bots which leads me to believe they are speaking of porn in general.

At boarding school many moons ago, we all used Tumblr to get our rocks off because most porn sites were blocked.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#138

Post by mlb_hn »

I don't get the justification for labeling the initial block as organic growth, unless they're claiming that only the horizontal stratification is signs of bot activity. The vertical stratification should also be signs of bot activity, and as they point out, many of the supposed bots were in the vertical stratification groups.

For those not familiar with the graphs, the graph shows date followed on x and date created on y. Where there's horizontal stratification, NYT noticed it means the follower accounts that all began following the account at the same time were also created around the same time, indicating a strain of bots. However, when there's vertical stratification, there's a shift in the rate at which accounts are following the account. When the vertical stratification is followed by horizontal stratification, it's an indication that both sets are bots - for example, one scenario is that instead of providing a mix of bots created at different time, someone got lazy and just grabbed a list of bots all created at the same time. However, vertical stratification could also just indicate that the person did something good or bad to change the rate of acquiring new followers so it isn't clear cut. That being said, I'm not sure that justifies labeling the initial section which lacks horizontal stratification as organic.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#139

Post by ryandrake »

kelnos wrote: post #131
CPLX wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. That seems to be an example, at least somewhat, of using the platform as intended. If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.

I see random accounts occasionally following me, and it's clear that they're just casting a very wide follow net to see who will follow back, presumably to get their readership up. To me, that's spam, no question about it. Even if it's targeted. (Targeted spam is still spam.) I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too…

I have had a Twitter account for I think close to a decade that I never use. I’ve never tweeted or followed anyone. Last time I logged in which was probably over 2 years ago, I had dozens of followers, all following nothing!
Post reply on HN