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Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

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Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#81

Post by oiuewr88 »

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…

I don't know why this is surprising

Large companies almost entirely maintain themselves with some level of clever accounting of their assets, if not outright falsehoods

Hollywood studios, MS, Apple, Amazon, GE, GM, Ford, Johnson & Johnson... all companies with well documented histories of exploitative thuggery and shady GAAP practices.

Everyone is hiding their numbers more and more these days so they can spin doctor them.

Little needs to be said about Wall Street welfare queen status

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#82

Post by FussyZeus »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
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…

I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on Twitter. I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used. I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That'…

I use it mainly to keep up with streamers and fellow artists, along with a good amount of news from various aggregators. I also have interesting conversations on there occasionally.

Twitter is what you make it. I'm sincerely worried their VC backed top heavy company is going to topple over and carry with it to oblivion a service that could probably run on 1/20th of it's infrastructure.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#83

Post by yourdonut »

camus2 wrote: post #78
yourdonut wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who." I know, I used to work there. I was asking you. Pattern matching isn't black-and-white, as you alluded to in your previous comment.

"Yes, the infamous 'they trust me, dumb fucks'?" You didn't do or say stupid things when you were 19? You don't believe in giving second chances, let alone to a teenager?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#84

Post by scott_s »

newobj wrote: post #38
scrollaway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just the right thing to do. That sounds like a sweeping statement with little forethought when you're talking about a platform that enabled protests in dictatorial regimes. Step back here: Fake users, sold by the thousands to give credibility and a megaphone to whoever shells out money: bad. Identity verification: A solution with many consequences to be weighed before jumping on the bandwagon. And dictatures a…

I know you're not saying that anonymous social networks are /strictly/ better than verified, but to maybe round this thought out explicitly - I think it's potentially naive to think that governments won't be able to wield social networks even more effectively than "freedom fighters". Whenever they catch up. Arab Spring was round 1, but I feel like round 2+ may have already played out in state actors' favors. Who know…

> I think it's potentially naive to think that governments won't be able to wield social networks even more effectively than "freedom fighters".

That exact thing is happening. The Reply All podcast did an excellent piece on the dominant political party in Mexico using armies of people on Twitter - not bots, but people - to drown out news they didn't like, and eventually, to harass people. Show, with full transcript: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/112-the-prophet/

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#85

Post by sincerely »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
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…

I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on Twitter. I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used. I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That'…

The only reason I use twitter is because it's where the forum culture of the 2000s has migrated. All the good SA posters pretty much only use twitter now, so it's the only place for that sort of content.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#86

Post by snowwrestler »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
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…

I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on Twitter. I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used. I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That'…

Twitter is the most awesome, amazing source of news and updates I've found. For example because I follow Tavis Ormandy on Twitter I know that a vulnerability related to bittorrent will soon be released by Google's Project Zero.

That said, it took months to get my feed to where it is today. It's not easy for each person to find the mix of accounts that is best for them. My recommendation is, be fast to follow folks who look interesting, and fast to unfollow folks if they are boring or you don't like them. When you find folks you like, see who they retweet, reply to, follow, etc. and follow all those folks to see what you think.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#87

Post by orionblastar »

jashmenn wrote: post #76

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…

Also fake SEO stuff like make an illegal web farm copied from your competitor's site and use a spambot to post their URL everywhere so Google penalizes then in web rank.

I was on Uncyclopedia when someone did that to get them removed from Google.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#88

Post by devonkim »

ionforce wrote: post #70
ForrestN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Tumblr porn is actually very specifically (and astutely) curated. The few times I've visited, it's actually a much nicer experience than porn websites. If anything, I think Tumblr would be wise to lean into being, among other things, a space for the sharing of erotic content. Maybe there's some spam but it's pretty easy to find your way into non-spam on Tumblr in my experience.

Isn't that a bit thorny since most of the content is copyrighted...

My understanding of the Tumblr porn content is that they’re usually small clips and I believe under so many seconds doesn’t count under copyright infringement laws. However, nothing would be a problem if it was original content that had waivers and age of consent forms and such on file.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#89

Post by grizzles »

I have a (maybe) interesting twitter related anecdote. 5-6 weeks back I went to the twitter website and I was greeted with a login screen. I couldn't remember my password and didn't feel like finding it so I went off to look at other sites. That happened a few times, until I went back and POOF, I am automatically logged back in again. I've never seen a site un-invalidate an auth token before. Cool beans.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#90

Post by mschuster91 »

ionforce wrote: post #70
ForrestN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Tumblr porn is actually very specifically (and astutely) curated. The few times I've visited, it's actually a much nicer experience than porn websites. If anything, I think Tumblr would be wise to lean into being, among other things, a space for the sharing of erotic content. Maybe there's some spam but it's pretty easy to find your way into non-spam on Tumblr in my experience.

Isn't that a bit thorny since most of the content is copyrighted...

Most on porn sites is, though.
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