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I am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
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The only practical way to do that is to take a credit card and run a test transaction against it. If Twitter had tried that it would have died in the nest. People wouldn't take the risk for an unknown benefit. A large portion of their current tweeters still wouldn't, or couldn't provide such proof.
> The only practical way to do that is to take a credit card and run a test transaction against it. Doesn't really work everywhere in the world.
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…
Twitter's model is basically "shouting at the universe" but if nobody listens it doesn't matter.
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'…
This is particularly relevant for hyper-local media which basically has zero media footprint outside of dead-tree newspapers and talk radio.
Basically: follow your city councilor on Twitter. Start from there.
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.
I got a new iPhone and on iOS Safari I needed to sign in to all my accounts.
Except for some reason Amazon recognised me with one-click enabled. I never used one-click to buy anything before and accidentally bought a kindle book while browsing the site.
More strangely, when I went to turn off one-click in my settings I was forced to log in.
So I could one-click buy without explicitly authenticating, but needed to authenticate to disable it. Very strange and/or shady.
Btw - is there an easy way to cancel an accidental one-click buy? In my case it was a local author I wanted to support anyway, so I’ll keep the purchase. But surprised it’s so easy to accidentally purchase something from the mobile site if you swipe to scroll on the wrong place.
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What's crazy is that bots are not violating Twitter TOS. I reported a bunch of fake accounts I found and was told they aren't breaking any rules, even ones just posting spammy links.
Well, yeah. If they're just tweeting and not @ing at other users, they can't really "spam" anyone since only their followers, who choose to see them, will see those messages. Twitter does take a pretty dim view of DM and @reply spam though because it is genuinely annoying and not opt-in.
I'm having trouble understanding the follower visualizations. Does the X axis represent her followers in the order they started following her and the Y axis is the date they (the follower) joined Twitter?
It's a kind of weird visualization, but the patterns which emerge are pretty striking (and obviously artificial).
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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.
I set up a fake Facebook profile a long time ago as a prank, added everyone at my college as friends, and people I know still say they get notifications about his birthday. And people still reach out to wish him a happy birthday. I have no idea what credentials I used to create it so I can't delete it, but it still exists (unlike the person it's pretending to be).
You creating a fake college account and forgetting about it probably passes as human enough, there's no concerted effort or agenda to that account besides existing and adding friends at your college.
I think what makes bots and fake accounts generally detectable is consistently pushing certain messages in ways that exceed normal human behavior, as well as showing patterns across many fake accounts.
It's hard to see a pattern in one fake account, but easy to spot it across many.
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> .. 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.
Take this hearsay as you like. Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle. And then stonewalled and foot dragged efforts to correct this. By the account I got the only incentive for action has been unflattering attention at…
I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news.
That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.
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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.
Careful here. This appears to be referring to the concept of fair use, but firstly there are multiple criteria used to judge fair use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors), secondly these criteria are (intentionally) subjective and up to a judge's interpretation, and thirdly fair use is US-only.