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Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

nytimes.com

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

#71

Post by sbr464 »

jackfoxy wrote: post #43
segmondy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly this. My other beef with twitter is a more sophisticated way to filter my timeline. I mean something that would make sense to a programmer, not the typical user friendly useless thing.

Yes I haven’t become a bigger Twitter user because it’s a huge time suck to actually get to the few topics/groups I care about. Medium also needs to do similar.

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

#72

Post by matchbok »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #15
matchbok wrote: post #12

Crazy 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.

Verifying humans is a solved problem.

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

#73

Post by matchbok »

wskinner wrote: post #16
matchbok wrote: post #12

Crazy 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 not a simple problem. It's a complex economic calculation with at least a few variables where the false positive rate directly impacts the bottom line as well as customer happiness, and the battleground is constantly changing as spammers get more advanced over time.

Force real human verification for real accounts, and then create a bot/computer/AI account for the bots that people actually use. Human verification is a solved problem for the most part.

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

#74

Post by lxmorj »

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

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

#75

Post by pavel_lishin »

matchbok wrote: post #72
pavel_lishin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Verifying humans is a solved problem.

Please fill us in.

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

#76

Post by realusername »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #57
wild_preference wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any hacker that manages to get the credentials of any verified user can just change that account's name and picture to that of a famous person for easy impersonation.

Just the fact that you can get a verified account and change the name to anything without the need to get verified again is a massive loophole.

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

#77

Post by jonathanjaeger »

lxmorj wrote: post #74

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

I noticed a TON of Binance related spam when searching for specific ticker symbols (Nasdaq/NYSE stocks, not coins). It's since gone away from what I search, so they're doing something right, but spam is a tough problem.

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

#78

Post by pitt1980 »

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…

Since I've thought the same thing 'I've followed these people but never see their tweets'

I googled around as to whether I could change the feed filter/ algorithm

Looks like if you go Settings/ Content Preferences/ there is a box for 'Show Best Tweets First' that you can uncheck,

which looks like it might shut off their recommendation filter, and then you can just get a stream of whatever everyone you follow posts

(or at least that's what I hope it is, I've had it set on that setting for all of 2 minutes, still seeing how it works)

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

#79

Post by zilitor »

lxmorj wrote: post #74

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

Finally someone has some perspective on things.

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

#80

Post by tropo »

These are not bots.

I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot. Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people like their privacy.

The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively, and twitter will assume you are a bot. The same does not seem to apply if you are on the other side of the political spectrum.

I think Twitter is well aware of this, and they consider it an intended result, but they can't just publicly admit it.

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