I thought everybody knew that a big chunk of Twitter works this way. I got to see it in action just a couple weeks ago with a pro-Trump network of fake Twitter accounts. I had the misfortune of having one of those @TrumpRulesMAGA4Eva style Twitter accounts reply to something I'd written with a standard pro-Trump meme. A couple people liked and favorited within an hour or so and then nothing. Then late on a Saturday night several days later, a whole network of Twitter accounts favorited and retweeted it. Most of them had similar style names but some had generic ones or random character strings. About half had an egg profile picture. Many of the others had tried to look legitimate with real names and pictures of people but tineye reverse searches showed 10,000+ hits on the images. Looking at the histories of the accounts, they'd all been used similarly for months.
Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
191–200 of 267 posts
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt that many of the commenters praising Trump, or any other politician for that matter, may in fact be sockpuppet accounts, but I wonder if this might be a similar situation to what we saw with polling prior to the election in which Trump voters were less willing to admit to voting for him. I'm not actually sure if this was the case but I've heard it theorized that this is one of the reasons polling might…
I mentioned that this happened on Conservative sites, and it was during the Primaries. It seems unlikely that, under those circumstances, people would be so shy about expressing their preferences. Also these are not just stand-alone fake accounts with no friends created for making comments....these are curated to have enough details that make them look plausible to an unsophisticated automated detector (or overworked…
Good points, although I didn't mean to dispute that these were mostly fake accounts meant to push an agenda.
As a side note, I don't have a FB account so I don't know how this works but do your friends have the ability to see what comments you've made on sites using FB login for commenting?
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
For #3, I no longer answer the phone with "Hello" from an unknown number. I wait for the person to say "Hello?" or if the person starts talking I just hang up.
All unknown numbers go to voicemail. Spammers inevitably leave 2-3 seconds of silence, so I just ban based on message duration. Usually, I report about 5-10 numbers a day.
I used to do phone surveys, that silence is the system connecting you to a human (or your answering machine).
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
These bots (and human run trolling accounts) have been widely reported on[1], but by many different organizations in different languages. Which seems to have made it not as widely known as it should be. I still see people arguing on twitter with what is clearly a bot. I would like to see someone write the story of the overarching result of what a world will look like in an increasing internet-focused world, when disi…
Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia. Consider how it is compatible with the existence of Putin's troll army. At the very least try to imagine the relative scale of money/power involved in the propaganda in the West compared to the rest of the world. (for reference, check military spendings)
>Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia.
Consider how it is compatible with the existence of Putin's troll army.
This completely misses the point of what the troll army is there to do. It isn't aiming at convincing people of a point of view, but confusing the audience. You should read this story from 2015: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31962644
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#195I would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into. Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any…
If you want another angle on the story, consider non-bot bots. (aka "sock puppets") You have an argument with someone on twitter and the next second 4 or 5 newly formed eggs with 1 follower apiece pile in to defend the other POV, sometimes without regard to civility. It could be a coincidence. Or it could be that the person you were debating let their ID out in another way. Edit: Just to be clear, I was talking about…
Tangent, but the Freudian id is usually rendered in all lowercase, and your meaning would be much clearer that way.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want another angle on the story, consider non-bot bots. (aka "sock puppets") You have an argument with someone on twitter and the next second 4 or 5 newly formed eggs with 1 follower apiece pile in to defend the other POV, sometimes without regard to civility. It could be a coincidence. Or it could be that the person you were debating let their ID out in another way. Edit: Just to be clear, I was talking about…
There are certainly a great many interesting angles ;) For a neat paper that actually has some nice hard evidence about what government production of social posts can look like, check out Gary King and co. at Harvard's exploration of Zhanggong, China: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf We summarized it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/business/international/ch...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644v1.pdf
"China". To think I used to actually pay for your paper in my errant youth! :)
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums. For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for pho…
I'm quite curious about this as a dabbling Twitter comedy content producer/dabbling Twitter developer. Are there any services out there that sell followers which are less distinguishable from a basic bot account? Or to ask a related question, how much work goes into creating the illusion of authenticity? I'm interested in estimating the likelihood of a given user being real.
I think it's silly that people downvoted me for being curious about a controversial topic. I would never pay for followers because the point is actual audience, not the perception of one. I'm interested in it because social networks interest me, and so does the problem of validation of users on social networks.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#198I would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into. Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any…
It's like the battle that newspapers have against ad blockers in people's browsers. Twitter has to balance usability here.
People make fake accounts for everything everywhere for all sorts of reasons. Seems as though you stumbled on some fakes that may all be related (all posting starwars quotes) but maybe not. Could be just some off the shelf software that creates twitter accounts.
Probably a non-negligible percent of people with the job description "social media manager" create small armies of bots to do their bidding.
The first stop for any investigative journalist looking into this would have to be blackhatworld.com ... it has a really intimidating name but it's all just about marketing/spamming that violates terms of use.
> "Their potential threats are real and scary due to the sheer size of the botnet," he said.
Kind of overstates things. These accounts will likely be used for spam or advertising of some sort. Journalists have a distorted worldview when it comes to the importance of Twitter. I know you all love it, but the rest of the world doesn't really care.
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
My cell phone's the same way now. Maybe one in ten calls, at best, isn't phone-spam. And that's with being on the Do Not Call list. I've been trying to figure out a way to do without an actual phone (except maybe a burner on the off chance I need to call 911) as a result. Text is by far the more valuable side of my phone plan, but mostly because everyone wants to use it for auth these days (I could switch to another…
Protip: I moved my legacy phone number (the number you get for customer service calls, that I hand out publicly, etc) over to google voice years ago. It follows me from phone to phone as I move carriers, everybody can reach me, and their "Press one to connect to the phone" feature throws off robodialers very effectively. The only downside is that google voice smells like the kind of service that google doesn't regard…
Google Voice had a revamp just this week: looks like it'll be around much more now.
https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updat...
Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
#200I would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into. Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any…
It's like the battle that newspapers have against ad blockers in people's browsers. Twitter has to balance usability here. People make fake accounts for everything everywhere for all sorts of reasons. Seems as though you stumbled on some fakes that may all be related (all posting starwars quotes) but maybe not. Could be just some off the shelf software that creates twitter accounts. Probably a non-negligible percent…
Speaking of accounts for various purposes, what's the reason you created this throwaway?