In a somewhat related note. I read the original NY Times article that laid out the case for the fake followers. The combination of good writing, investigative journalism and compelling presentation actually made me feel like they are producing content worth paying for. I am now subscribing to the new york times.
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
141–150 of 173 posts
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#142Okay, who puts time on the Y axis of a graph? Honestly.
We scroll down and that becomes a "animation while scrolling". While its an unusual orientation, it believe it is the right one. Its not a time axis - its "time since the user was created".
The graph isn't a "this is how many followers the user had at this point in time" but rather "right now, here are all the followers this user."
A point is "the Xth user following had a join date of Y" and thus the X axis is in effect a time axis (though not a linear time axis).
From an eye scanning view, the horizontal bands are easier to follow and notice than vertical ones - and that is part of the goal of the graphic (to emphasize those bands).
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#143Twitter 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…
>After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users.
I am kind of surprised the number of human users is so high. I know a lot of bloggers of various sizes. To the best of my knowledge virtually all of them have hooked up one of the available services to post on their behalf. They either spend a little time scheduling out their tweets for the next week/month then forget about twitter until their schedule runs dry OR they set something up to randomly pick from some pool of blog posts and spam links.
Either way they then essentially never go on twitter again once things are up and running. The whole thing is full of bots talking to each other.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
>But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing.
I would dispute that. I'd argue that the bots exist because spamming twitter is free. If it costs me $0 and I get even a tiny benefit out of it then it is to my advantage.
Its essentially the same problem as spam email.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#145I 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?
Perhaps the original article, which this is a follow-up to, could be enlightening:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/so...
two young siblings... earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella.
But her Twitter account — and her brother’s — are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records.
The idea that dubious businesses are possibly skimming money off big brands (or even more disturbingly, possibly with the knowledge of those brands) by using fake followers is interesting, and newsworthy. Add widespread identity theft into the mix, and it’s even more newsworthy.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#146Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#147Okay, who puts time on the Y axis of a graph? Honestly.
thaaaaaaank you
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
The only reason I use twitter is because it's where the forum culture of the 2000s has migrated. All the good SA posters pretty much only use twitter now, so it's the only place for that sort of content.
What's "SA"?
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not your problem when the content is user-uploaded.
tell that to piratebay
No.
They brought the heat on themselves when they decided to mock DMCA requests and cease and desists instead of accommodating them.
There's a reason 4chan, Reddit, imgur, Tumblr and its ilk all still exist in the age of copyright. None of them produce their own content-- it's all user submitted, and mostly in violation of some copyright or another.
Generally speaking, my understanding is that hosts aren't liable for user-uploaded content unless they curate or promote it (deletion notwithstanding). That changes their role to that of a content distributor/publisher instead of a mere platform. This is why backpage's CEO got arrested for human trafficking whereas craigslist's did not-- when challenged craigslist shut down its prostitution ads, but Backpage actively reworded and posted them and in doing so became their publisher.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#150In a somewhat related note. I read the original NY Times article that laid out the case for the fake followers. The combination of good writing, investigative journalism and compelling presentation actually made me feel like they are producing content worth paying for. I am now subscribing to the new york times.
Don't take anything you read in the New York Times about twitter bots too seriously. They do publish articles that look superficially well researched but which are nonsense or actually deceptive:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
The problem is that some phrases that appear on the surface to have one meaning have been grabbed and redefined by particular political groups, almost used as code words. "Bot" and especially "Russian Twitter Bot" for example isn't used by Twitter or others in the way you'd always expect:
https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-video-t...
"Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers," Singh says. "They'll be like guns, God, America, like, and with the American flag and like the cross. Who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."
The idea that Twitter bots can change society in fundamental ways is one that seems to obsess journalists, who all seem to spend half their day on Twitter anyway, but I've yet to see evidence that it's true.