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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

#71

Post by fwip »

chimeracoder wrote: post #61
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…

> BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn. ...what? Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users t…

The porn bots have only gotten worse, though. In 2012 it was at least mostly human-run porn blogs, and they didn't start following you if you were just a regular blog.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#72

Post by camus2 »

yourdonut wrote: post #14
tinbad wrote: post #2

It's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just the right thing to do. [1] https://t…

Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.

> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience.

Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't.

Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included.

Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles, so no, fake users do not necessary worsen the experience for real ones.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#73

Post by FussyZeus »

chimeracoder wrote: post #61
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…

> BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn. ...what? Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users t…

One of Tumblr's differentiators is allowing adult content. It's very hard to find places friendly to that when you're looking to distribute your artwork and get a following going.

Thankfully more and more websites are based out of other countries now and don't need to swim in the puritan current of the US.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#75

Post by nindalf »

netsharc wrote: post #24
nindalf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .. FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts What makes you think Facebook isn't prioritizing this? I'm not questioning whether you're right about this, just curious about what made you draw this conclusion.

"Hey, $MAJOR_CORP, advertise with us, you'll reach millions of your target market! Just pay $X." "So how many of them are real and how many of them are fake accounts?" "We work very hard to make sure Facebook is free of fake accounts." "That's not the answer to my question.".

Its interesting you'd say that, considering that facebook publishes an estimate of the percentage of fake accounts in its quarterly public filing.

Disclaimer - I work for facebook.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#76

Post by jashmenn »

We have to be careful about botshaming people who have too many fake followers: it's pretty easy to buy your enemy a bunch of fake followers just to discredit them.

Fun story, years ago in my office, before buying followers was well known, folks would prank each other by buying fake followers for our co-workers. They'd wake up and be so happy and surprised and then have to spend the weekend manually blocking each one.

At the time it seemed pretty harmless, but now it is definitely a threat to someone's credibility.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#77

Post by yourdonut »

camus2 wrote: post #72
yourdonut wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.

> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't. Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included. Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles,…

"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles" "Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake."

You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.

"Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression"

Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#78

Post by camus2 »

yourdonut wrote: post #77
camus2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't. Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included. Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles,…

"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles" "Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake." You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem. "Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression" Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why…

> You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.

Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who.

> Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?

Yes, the infamous "they trust me, dumb fucks"?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#79

Post by macintux »

twinkletwinkle wrote: post #49
scrollaway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an argument about whether social media is a net positive. This is about people , and whether Twitter protects its users at risk, or builds a system which just begs for government to request their real names.

Would it be possible to do a 1-time verification, and then throw away the data? Twitter needs to see a driver's license or passport once, not keep a scan of it.

That seems fraught with peril also. Does Twitter do any check of the data? If not, you've probably just dramatically expanded the market for fake IDs. If so, can governments monitor such verification attempts and associate them with new accounts? If you're living under a hostile regime would you trust Twitter with your ID regardless of assertions of confidentiality?

And there are many people who lack a driver's license and passport. Are they disenfranchised?

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