Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#151

Post by tnolet » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC

yourdonut wrote: post #14

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…

Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.

Weirdly enough and probably unrelated, I had at least 4 fake friend request from “attractive” women in the last 2 weeks on FB. Mostly these accounts would disappear within hours or minutes. Never had that in x years of being on FB.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#152

Post by smcl » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:05 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #148

sincerely wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

SomethingAwful - the accounts they meant are probably guys like @arr, @livestock, @dogboner, @sexyfacts4u, @dril

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#153

Post by eecc » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #133

scrollaway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Oh great, so now we’d be tied down by chains of conformity. How’s that for a surprising change of meaning to the phrase “Global Village”!

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#154

Post by rspeer » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:23 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #119

ImSkeptical wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience with ads all the time. Like, I get ads from Google to buy the Pixel XL 2 while I'm browsing the web on the Pixel XL 2 I recently bought from Google on the same account I'm currently signed in to Google with... Or Amazon will give me ads for books and things I recently purchased through Amazon. I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.

It's not Google's fault. It's the people buying the ads who are too lazy or don't know how to do proper targeting. I've met three people in my life who were employed primarily to place ads on the internet. All three were glorified secretarial drones who fell into the position because nobody else wanted to do it.

"Lazy"? It seems to me that the ad ecosystem is incredibly complicated (for example, not even Google understands how malvertising gets on Google's ad network).

Any person who knows how to effectively place Internet ads has such high-status skills that they don't have to actually do it.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#155

Post by sbtrct » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

ErikAugust wrote: post #134

chatmasta wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't used an official Twitter client for a while, but you certainly used to be able to block the account making a sponsored tweet, which will remove it from your timeline.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#156

Post by ohashi » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

ErikAugust wrote: post #114

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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 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…

I was signing up for your service until I saw the permissions your app wants. Permission to update my profile? See my DMs? It doesn't explain anywhere I could find why it needs these permissions.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#157

Post by flurdy » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #122

snowwrestler wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is the most awesome, amazing source of news and updates I've found. For example because I follow Tavis Ormandy on Twitter I know that a vulnerability related to bittorrent will soon be released by Google's Project Zero. That said, it took months to get my feed to where it is today. It's not easy for each person to find the mix of accounts that is best for them. My recommendation is, be fast to follow folks wh…

are there services out there which curate the channels available to insure quality and content? Say if I wanted to follow a particular sport or team, are there services which can set it up? Same goes for any subject

That would be very subjective. But probably exists. I am a heavy user of Twitter's List feature, and have columns in Tweetdeck for friends, local, sports, politics, colleagues etc. And try to curate these for my interest as best as possible, ie weed out too noisy tweeters etc.

I guess you can find other people's lists and follow them? E.g. a sports journalist's sports lists etc. I have not tried to do that so not sure if there are hurdles to overcome. And maybe someone can aggregate these public lists for others to find/follow?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#158

Post by orionblastar » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #99

aaroninsf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this hearsay as you like. Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle. And then stonewalled and foot dragged efforts to correct this. By the account I got the only incentive for action has been unflattering attention at…

Propaganda is separate from fake users though. I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news. That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.

I've seen stuff debunked by Snopes ECT so I link to Snopes to show my friend that what they shared was fake news, only to see him share the same link next week. He claimed he did not read the article but it agreed with his political views so it must be true.

I've seen fake Twitter tweets as well that have bad spelling and other stuff in them that it is obviously a fake tweet made by some website fake tweet generators out there. Then shared on Facebook as an uploaded image. If they don't link to the original tweet on Twitter consider it a fake tweet.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#159

Post by fabatka » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

What I don't really understand about this is, why is anybody concerned with fake accounts and followers outside of ad companies? (Disregard now the possible public opinion influencing use of huge fake account networks, I can't even see this argument against bot accounts in this article.) As I see it, both bot account sellers/maintainers and celebrities profit from this, only the ad companies can lose when their business partners realize that they get fake visibility for their money and decide not to give money for this. Of course this would in turn eliminate the sponsorships of accounts and thus the buying of fake followers. So I guess I don't really get why this industry exists in the first place...

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#160

Post by perl4ever » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 10:23 AM UTC

orionblastar wrote: post #158

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propaganda is separate from fake users though. I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news. That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.

I've seen stuff debunked by Snopes ECT so I link to Snopes to show my friend that what they shared was fake news, only to see him share the same link next week. He claimed he did not read the article but it agreed with his political views so it must be true. I've seen fake Twitter tweets as well that have bad spelling and other stuff in them that it is obviously a fake tweet made by some website fake tweet generators…

Your criterion for determining a fake tweet doesn't work if someone regularly tweets things and then deletes them. The combination of this behavior and abundant fake tweets allows people who like and who loathe a particular person on Twitter to build up opposing views of what is real.