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Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#171

Post by orionblastar »

perl4ever wrote: post #160
orionblastar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it is hard to determine fake tweets if someone keeps deleting their tweets.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#172

Post by perl4ever »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
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'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'…

I was using it to get notified every time my favorite columnist put up something new. Unfortunately, the publisher started requiring registration to read stuff.

But I see it as a way to keep track of what a columnist, journalist, or public figure is doing.

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