Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers • Hacker News Board

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#61

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:15 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #29

briandear wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.

I'm surprised to see comments like this on HN. Technically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to tell for sure which accounts are bots and which aren't. How can they tell?

There are plenty of ways, Javascript is an amazing thing. For instance, anyone running this site can see that I typed this in character-by-character, and even had to hit backspace a few times. Dumping all of the text in at once would be suspicious. Not a clear indicator of a bot, but one indicator at least. I also moved my mouse and just expanded the text box so I could see my thoughts. Not something a bot would normally do. I'm also coming from an IP address that only ever posts to one account, not to multiple. My browser fingerprint only posts to one account. My browser fingerprint shows me on a Macbook using Chrome, and my cookies indicate I have a web browsing history. I upvote. I downvote. I post something, then engage in a follow-up discussion later on. These follow ups are upvoted by other accounts that match all or most of the above criteria.

My day job is information security, specifically working with a SIEM to correlate many diverse logs from many diverse systems and figure out what really happened using many pieces of individually benign data. None of these things are themselves indicators of bots, but the more you start to trip these rules, the more bot-like your behavior becomes. Eventually it paints a picture that shows no human could reasonably be behind an account that routinely posts two or more tweets at the same time, never engages in follow-ups, is only followed/liked by other suspicious accounts, and has a user agent of Python 3.7 coming from a source IP on aws.amazon.ru. You show them a captcha and if they fail or bail, you've got 'em.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#62

Post by monochromatic » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos 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…

We’ll see. Twitter has a history of being overinclusive of conservatives in assessing bot accounts. If this purge is just more of the same, they don’t deserve any congratulations.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#63

Post by rtpg » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:40 AM UTC

bredren wrote: post #19

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos 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…

> Kudos to twitter Kudos? I wouldn't hand over a kudos to twitter. The article triggering this bot ban wave [1] was written by the Times and included behavior analysis that Twitter easily could (and may have) done on its own years ago. Facebook's actions and marketer value has nothing to do with Twitter's own lack of action to prevent infiltration and manipulation of its platform. Twitter's action on stopping spam, b…

He keeps on saying they don't do enough, the times is able to do this despite not even having access to raw internal data

I feel like Twitter as an organization doesn't actually care about the problem, just about their image.

Why else would they talk about the hate speech stuff and continuously elevate groups like The Proud Boys through their verification process (that also affects their suggestion algorithms). And we shouldn't forget that many Gamergate people are still active on Twitter and often use their accounts to direct harassment to people on a regular basis!

The even more cynical view is that there's a group of employees within Twitter actively protecting these kinds of users

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#64

Post by orionblastar » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:40 AM UTC

slig wrote: post #53

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos 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…

> Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's possible to block friends requests from anyone except friends of friends.

Have followers on Facebook and filter your friends requests. That is what I do.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#65

Post by ravenstine » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:41 AM UTC

simplecomplex wrote: post #58

How can an account be fake? An account impersonating someone else? That's very different from an account that exists solely to boost follower counts. What's the problem with people paying to boost their follower count?

There really isn't, but then again, I don't know why they'd pay at all; it's hilariously easy to get a "following" on Twitter by simply following random people. I never use Twitter, but I once tried just following random people to see what would happen and I had about 200 "followers" within a few days, all from maybe an hour or two total of randomly clicking. Now 200 is peanuts, but imagine if I had kept it up for longer! Hahaha. It's so ridiculous how easily people will just follow each other on Twitter. It means virtually nothing, with or without fake accounts or people paying to boost their count.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#66

Post by colordrops » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 12:45 AM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #32

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos 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…

They can't control the narrative if they show every tweet.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#67

Post by TylerH » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

basscomm wrote: post #50

spullara wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.

You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.

I actually deal with this by marking every "liked" tweet shown to me as "I don't like this Tweet" whenever it happens, and then after each time I tweet at Twitter and TwitterSupport to stop showing it to me ever. Works well for about 3 or 4 months until I get another batch of 10 or so "liked" tweets.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#68

Post by vmarsy » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

basscomm wrote: post #50

spullara wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.

You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.

> but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow like

Yes you can, not through an official setting unfortunately. But as TylerH said you just say "I don't like this tweet" on a few of the tweets that you see because "person X liked this", then refrsh your feed and they're all gone.

Maybe after 6 months-ish they come back, but you notice it really fast since suddenly your twitter feed sucks. Just do the "I don't like this tweet" trick again.

The only 'likes' I see now is if multiple people I follow liked a tweet from someone I also follow. Usually those are good quality.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#69

Post by JacobJans » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 1:52 AM UTC

briandear wrote: post #17

jermaustin1 wrote: post #7

As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.

We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.

I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500?

If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be no reason to stop the ads.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#70

Post by JacobJans » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos 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…

> We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't.

It seems to me that the rational reason to stop an ad campaign is because it stopped enough making money.

It's not fake clicks that should be stopping you -- it should be a lack of ROI.

I wonder how many people spend huge sums of money on Facebook without tracking their return on investment. I seriously think that is the source of many of these complaints about Facebook's ad program.

I spend a few thousand a month of Facebook. I have no idea if there are fake clicks or not. But, it's not a metric that seems to matter in my business.