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Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

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Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#71

Post by notahacker »

vertis wrote: post #54
thefreeman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider people don't agree with your opinion? I am anti Trump but not everybody is. Also there are bots on all sides of the political spectrum as evidenced by the article you are commenting on which dealt with an account pumping Bernie.

It's a well-reasoned respectful comment though. It has been the HN way that downvoting is really to punish overtly bad comments and a lack of upvoting boring comments.

It's also the HN way to downvote comments which include complaints about the comment being downvoted though [more so if they speculate the comment is being downvoted due to bots and followup with a request for moderator intervention]. Suspect that's the wider issue here.

More generally, political comments are bound to attract some downvotes from people who either support the other side or don't like politics on HN, although you'd normally expect more upvotes on a comment which is on-topic, only tangentially related to the figure's politics and well-reasoned and civil

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#72

Post by Brain_Thief »

biznickman wrote: post #40

I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.

I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change.

I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#73

Post by kleer001 »

xaxsacsdaffbnk wrote: post #60

Many people use fake avatars, names and locations. Those are not good indicators for bots. Presumably it is more obvious by the stuff being posted. However, the whole question is mostly irrelevant. If you don't care what an account tweets about, don't follow it. The big issue with the whole bot manipulation narrative is that while it is easy to create fake accounts, it is not easy to also get followers for those acco…

However it is easy to create followers for that fake account to add credibility.

Why are you defending Twitter so hard? It's garbage and needs to die. Vested interest?

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#74

Post by mannykannot »

Traster wrote: post #32
mannykannot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the pressure that Elliott is putting on Dorsey to aggressively grow Twitter, I don't think it is likely that things will improve. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/9/21171482/twitter-jack-do...

They got 3 seats on the board and agreed to create a committee literally to search for Dorsey's successor. It's far too late for Dorsey. Realistically they're just letting him go out on his own terms at this point. In a few months Dorsey will announce that he's stepping down because he wants to focus his attention on his other job and that'll be that.

I expect so, but I don't expect Elliott to scale back its expectations significantly after that happens.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#75

Post by GrinningFool »

datashow wrote: post #22

Why would I follow someone with only 73 followers in the first place? I wish twitter can let me choose to filter out any information from accounts with less than 10000 followers, with exception of my own followings.

Why would you limit yourself to hearing only people who have large followings?

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#76

Post by xaxsacsdaffbnk »

anigbrowl wrote: post #66
xaxsacsdaffbnk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to demand somebody should be given the authority to determine what is disinformation and what is not. That is a totalitarian approach. Those few Twitter bots don't hurt anybody, because nobody listens to them anyway. And if people do listen to them, they will eventually catch on and their information immune system will have been strengthened.

Available evidence doesn't support your claims.

Such as??? Please point to the evidence, I am genuinely interested.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#77

Post by xaxsacsdaffbnk »

kleer001 wrote: post #73
xaxsacsdaffbnk wrote: post #60

Many people use fake avatars, names and locations. Those are not good indicators for bots. Presumably it is more obvious by the stuff being posted. However, the whole question is mostly irrelevant. If you don't care what an account tweets about, don't follow it. The big issue with the whole bot manipulation narrative is that while it is easy to create fake accounts, it is not easy to also get followers for those acco…

However it is easy to create followers for that fake account to add credibility. Why are you defending Twitter so hard? It's garbage and needs to die. Vested interest?

Yeah, I am actually an Arabian oil prince with 60% stakes in Twitter shares.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#78

Post by zimpenfish »

brenden2 wrote: post #63

Twitter has become so low quality that I don't even bother looking at it anymore. The interactions tend to be extremely negative, the ads are annoying and irrelevant, and most of the people who get famous tend to be celebs or narcissistic pseudo-intellectuals who just repeat whatever the populist opinions are for their audience. I've found/met some interesting people though Twitter before, but these days I find it's…

> more options to block/filter low quality content

Over and above what you can already do with curating your followers, blocking people, muting people, muting hashtags, etc.? That's quite the range of options for buffing up the quality content of your timeline, no?

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#79

Post by zimpenfish »

ryanar wrote: post #11
Lendal wrote: post #7

Most of this article is talking about fake photos, not fake Twitter accounts. He goes on to say that if you use your Twitter account for politics, then you are fake. The only thing I agree with is 766 posts in a week is extreme and is an indicator of bot-like activity.

Tweeting at 4-6am and 1-3pm NY time is pretty unusual, and showing up as a dead lawyer in the registry is another quirk. That said, while interesting, I don't know if this article has offered any practical advice. They essentially said, become a private investigator to find out if they are fake.

> Tweeting at 4-6am and 1-3pm NY time is pretty unusual

I dunno - if you're a (purported) lawyer in NY, I could imagine 4-6am would be "getting up, gym, breakfast" and 1-3pm would be "lunch, gym, whatever". I'd be more suspicious about the lack of evening tweets, myself.

> showing up as a dead lawyer

I would probably consider that quite suspicious, yeah.

Re: Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

#80

Post by deminature »

inetknght wrote: post #53
deminature wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially. Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick t…

> but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.

There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument.

Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

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