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Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

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Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#81

Post by slig »

mod wrote: post #77
MichaelBurge wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting to get a Gmail account, turn on the setting that makes Twitter email you notifications, mark tweets as spam in Gmail, and then use Google's spam detection as an existence proof of a solution if it's successful?

No, he's saying people by-and-large can't defeat Gmail's spam detection. The same will likely happen at twitter.

> The same will likely happen at twitter.

It took them years to let users upload images (when there was a clear demand and parasite services grew out of this) and there's obvious spam accounts that could've shadow banned with very simple heuristics.

So I don't think this is going to happen.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#82

Post by sidlls »

dotnetisnotdead wrote: post #59
eropple wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Twitter wants to show the alt-left tools the door too, I'm certainly not gonna cape up for them. But there is a difference of orders of magnitude in both size and cohesiveness to wrestle with here, and it's not towards the burned Bernie bros. That alt-left doesn't have members of state-blessed media outlets (well, until recently, when cheering on pedophilia became a little too much for them) on campus tours where…

You're kidding right? The right says a lot of stupid things...ok TONS of stupid things, but "left leaning media" isn't one of them. These media outlets may not be state blessed, but we have the media on our side, and we have our Jackals for sure. 99% of the media is leaning hard to the left on everything. The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt,…

The media does not have a "hard left" bias. They have a "hard profit" bias. The most recent example is the 2016 election, in which they used an orange haired fascist and a right-leaning, conservative "new Democrat" to amplify their entertainment driven ratings (and ad revenue).

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#83

Post by gozur88 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #33
Mendenhall wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea thats pretty much all twitter is. I think of all the people tweeting politicians etc.

I've got a good stable of local folks with interests that match mine. Plenty of interesting conversations to be had - who you follow is up to you.

I wonder how many people are like you, as a percentage of the total.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

notadoc wrote: post #47

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template. Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engageme…

What tools do people use to administer these? Since Twitter and other platforms seem to have no interest in fixing the problem I figure I might as well stop trying to abide by their ToS and leverage the technology for my own agenda.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#85

Post by remarkEon »

eropple wrote: post #63
dotnetisnotdead wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding right? The right says a lot of stupid things...ok TONS of stupid things, but "left leaning media" isn't one of them. These media outlets may not be state blessed, but we have the media on our side, and we have our Jackals for sure. 99% of the media is leaning hard to the left on everything. The Milo incident is a fine example. While was repugnant and deserved it, that was an absolute media witch hunt,…

Bill Maher isn't a hero and is largely considered in the circles I run in to be the trashfire alt-left sort who I'd be happy to see the back of. He is emphatically not "my people" and never has been. So I'm not really sure what you're getting at there. Yiannopoulos got a little more attention, which he wanted, because he decided to spend a lot of time being a scumbag to get people to look at him. And it bit him becau…

>Bill Maher isn't a hero and is largely considered in the circles I run in to be the trashfire alt-left sort who I'd be happy to see the back of.

Curious. Looks like there's a lack of clear definitions here, because when I hear "alt-left" (or "control-left" as Maajid Nawaz likes to say) to me that means the SJW types who are quick to accuse anyone they disagree with as being a "bigot" or whatever. Maher seems pretty firmly against that.

>Your garden-variety possibly-a-war-criminal conservative (hi, John Yoo) gets op-eds in the New York Times, not "witch hunts".

Not really worth curating all the questionable left-wing folks major outlets have on staff or let write editorials, but it does seem odd to cite Yoo, here, since arguably that would be an example of the NYT trying to be objective and let you hear the otherside instead of just telling you what to think (FWIW he seems to be a Trump critic, so that aligns well with the NYT editoral board right now). I prefer the former.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#86

Post by mikeyouse »

dotnetisnotdead wrote: post #73
epistasis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One quibble: the block button is not free, it takes time, and we have limited time. Say, 60 presses/minute? When you have 3000 harassers, including many bots, is it worth spending nearly an hour blocking them? There are third party tools that make the block button cost less, but it would be even better if they were built in to Twitter, and even better yet if the bot networks were not allowed.

Good point, I've never been harassed at that level before.

Not OP, but I definitely have -- it's unbelievably annoying to deal with.

I had tweeted something pretty innocuous to a journalist after the election. I wasn't screaming about an illegitimate president or anything of the sort, it was something like, "Maybe we should look at adding more members of congress, it would smooth out the electoral college and make for better representation."

Several months later, some random right-wing asshole with 50,000+ followers retweeted my comment and said something like "Hillary supporters just won't get over losing!"

Within minutes I was absolutely inundated with his moron followers / bots. Literally hundreds of responses calling me a butthurt Liberal and going through my old comments so that I couldn't just block that one.

Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time? None of those people followed me, they knew nothing of me or my politics, they just blindly chase whatever signal their 'leaders' choose to amplify.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#88

Post by taytus »

notadoc wrote: post #47

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template. Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engageme…

"Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product", this is easy to answer. Investors. Investors who don't care about nothing but vanity metrics, investors who don't make CEOs accountable. This is why, twitter is not the exception.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#89

Post by ghettoCoder »

Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter's demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted.

I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there...

Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#90

Post by dxbydt »

usrusr wrote: post #40
WillyOnWheels wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tweet 100s of times the same text at accounts that don't follow you, you're a bot.

Except when Twitter makes that a heuristic for detecting bots, then they'll soon stop tweeting the same text twice.

>Except when Twitter makes that a heuristic for detecting bots

There are several dozen. Maybe not turned on in prod, but that's a whole another story. In fact, within three months of joining, way back in 2012, one of my very first tasks was to write a standard datamining job that would compute the difference between the GPS location during office hours (9-5pm) and the GPS location during home hours (7pm-7am) of everyone who tweets. A histogram of those differences would tell you about the commute distance of the average American who tweets. You could then bucket by region and say interesting things like the average NY tweeter commutes 25 miles more than the average CA tweeter. Looking at the results we got, it was clear there was a substantial percent of bots, because their location varied so widely, minute to minute hour to hour. Haversine of GPS diffs will be reasonably stable, because your IP maps to the GPS ( we used the standard Maxmind geoip2 API) , and those IPs are relatively stable....Except if you are a bot and switching IPs willy-nilly. This was just one instance, but there were several such projects...usually interns and new employees would work on these to get their feet wet, and then move on to more substantial projects.

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