Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eliminating all bots is not desirable. Many of them are useful and interesting. Eliminating the bad ones with few false positives is hard.
Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.
BOTS MATTER
Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#32Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…
As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have been tweeting tons! Meanwhile, I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it. What I've done is to unfollow a good amount of folks to reduce the noise.
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#33Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…
I think you're overstating the frequency of fake friend requests on Facebook. I'm fairly active on there and usually receive less than one per week. (It was worse a couple years ago.)
It may be a 'type' thing. Every time I look at my neglected Facebook account I have anywhere from 6 to maybe 15 friends requests from accounts which have basically no timeline and a "sexy" picture of a 20 something female. If those accounts do have any friends it seems they are all white males over 50 years of age.
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#34I wonder if bot sellers will see an increase in sales? and Twitter announces a lot of new users soon.....
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#35The really great thing about this situation is how crazy people/assholes can just reject whatever they don't like as coming from a "Russian troll bot". Easy cognitive kill switch.
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#36Crazy that Twitter still sells ads and soooooo many of the accounts are bots. They have an obvious interest in inflating the total numbers. It's a super, super simple problem. If they really cared, they'd eliminate bots entirely. Not that hard.
> It's a super, super simple problem. No offense, but that's incredibly easy to say when you're not the one responsible for doing it.
It might turn into a game of cat-and-mouse, but Twitter just hasn't been much of a cat so far. Finding large bot networks is pretty easy according to the researchers who do it all the time. https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-dema... https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-...
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eliminating all bots is not desirable. Many of them are useful and interesting. Eliminating the bad ones with few false positives is hard.
Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.
You could just fudge the numbers a little bit and have the system say "~X human, ~Y bot followers".
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#38There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.
They started to do this but then paused all verifications because bots were getting verified.
I saw one of those Ethereum scambot dopplegangers on a high profile tweet that was verified. Really looked awful and definitely caused more damage since people are trained to trust it.
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#39Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…
Instagram has a similar issue as well. It's brain-dead to buy fake followers, have them simulate interaction with your posts to push you higher in the algorithm ranking, and bots are the majority of the user-base from what I can tell. And they have no intention whatsoever of fixing that.
Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
#40the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible to the naked eye.
This sounds like something a bot / Russian troll would say.
Please don't break the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This is a particularly toxic variant of that poison, and it's important not to use it here.