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Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

bbc.com

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Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#21

Post by CaptSpify »

danso wrote: post #2

This seems like a pretty straightforward thing to identify. I remember when the NYT's story, "The Agency", was published [0], some of the fake accounts it had mentioned were still up. Even though the accounts in that story were actually populated by real people, the sockpuppetry was pretty easy to identify. One: the accounts' past tweets right up until they started spreading the news about the fake U.S. disaster were…

Does FB really have an incentive to care though? Obviously it should dilute the effectiveness of their advertising system, but if people still keep throwing money at them...

I'm not in that industry , so I'm genuinely asking

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#22

Post by fokov »

OliverJones wrote: post #20

Huh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted. It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need t…

Does anyone know if any of the social media sites have release info on their relative bot counts?

I'm curious because I've seen the same posts in different places and now see a ton of comments boiling down to "Source?" again. The later used to be everywhere 8-9 years ago, but were typically people that actually wanted a source to read not just spam the question. Now it seems they are spamming it to distract from the real conversations.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#23

Post by chrisvogt »

I get follows from obvious bots (bio: "click here for 5000 follows") very regularly on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Instagram almost always removes the account, Facebook has always responded the account "doesn't violate the rules", and Twitter I'm not sure about, but I always block and report that garbage.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#26

Post by cblock811 »

dgfgfdagasdfgfa wrote: post #8

Bot accounts, not fake accounts. I don't even know what the latter means—plenty of people don't associate twitter with their real name. And why would you! Secondly, of course there are this many. There are probably many more. I run several bots myself; there's nothing wrong with this. Twitter's TOS is only as good as its enforcement, and if there's anything twitter is terrible at, it's having any control over its com…

A fake account on social media (as far as I have seen) can be things like alter-egos. There was a subculture on Facebook of making fake 'emo' accounts. They used to clog up my suggested friends list.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#28

Post by jashkenas »

I 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 interesting leads or tips, I'd encourage you to get in touch. You can reach me at my username @nytimes.com, or email me and I'll send you my Signal number.

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#29

Post by geofft »

dgfgfdagasdfgfa wrote: post #8

Bot accounts, not fake accounts. I don't even know what the latter means—plenty of people don't associate twitter with their real name. And why would you! Secondly, of course there are this many. There are probably many more. I run several bots myself; there's nothing wrong with this. Twitter's TOS is only as good as its enforcement, and if there's anything twitter is terrible at, it's having any control over its com…

"Fake" implies deception: it's fake because it counterfeits or forges something else that is real.

An anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account run by a human, in the way that a human is expected to use a Twitter account, is not a fake account: it's real, just pseudonymous. A bot account that's clearly a bot, like @big_ben_clock or @choochoobot, isn't a fake account either: it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.

From the article: "These accounts did not act like the bots other researchers had found but were clearly not being run by humans."

One thing a network of fake accounts could be doing is inflating follower counts. A follow from a pseudonymous account that corresponds to an actual human isn't fake. Even a constant factor or constant term from a small number of humans with multiple accounts isn't particularly deceptive. But thousands or millions of follows from accounts run by a handful of humans is deceptive.

Another thing a fake account could be doing is spreading propaganda by creating the impression that many people agree with a political opinion, when these "people" are just canned responses, or humans assisted by automation (but capable of making human replies across large numbers of accounts).

Re: Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

#30

Post by doctorshady »

OliverJones wrote: post #20

Huh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted. It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need t…

I get your analogy, but the great thing about landlines is you can selectively forward unwanted callers to anything you feel like. Social media websites don't tend to have anything like that.
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