I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, but it worked for weeks without Twitter doing anything.
I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...
Is it for some reason not a viable solution to just stop following people who shitpost? Or does Twitter push random users' posts at you? I ask because I've been circling around Twitter for a month or so, but if you can't isolate yourself from public tweets, I'm definitely not going to jump in.
If I may make a suggestion, and I'm not sure what your use-case plans are for it -- maybe this isn't feasible for you, but if you absolutely MUST use Twitter, do not install it on your phone. Keep it to just the desktop website version. My reasons for suggesting this are three-fold: 1) Twitter at it's core is, IMO, nothing but a distraction. You will be less productive and less interactive with real people in real life. 2) The Internet Fuckwad Theory is in full effect in the Twitter-verse at all times. Depending on your personality, it may very well make you more depressed/mad/whatever -- it's not going to change your daily life for the better at any rate. 3) Twitter tracks you & harvests your data, and if you install it on your phone they will have much more data about/from you -- and we (as in, everyone on the planet) do not need any more tracking/spying/snooping/etc.
It is certainly viable. I follow an interesting group of users and unfollow anyone who becomes problematic. There are some "Promoted" tweets that are essentially ads, but they are easy to ignore if not interesting.
I don't think I see any ads using Tweetbot. I may also miss some features, but don't really care about that. I like that my Twitter feed is just a stream of tweets.
I don't think your parent makes judgement on the value of any political position. Trolls here just refers to people who are shouting without contributing to the discussion.
What they're saying is that once any user has a sufficiently large following the replies to their tweets with any signal are lost in the noise of unrelated political rantings (both sides) and scam bots hoping to take advantage of the exposure that replying to big users has.
These groups both manipulate the rankings. Political ravings are upvoted by the similarly inclined politicals. The bots work in swarms to favourite their own posts and reply with "Wow, worked for me, thanks!"
i find complaints against twitter to be somewhat alien because it is a fairly major source of good content for me. as an example, i just browsed my twitter for a minute or so on my phone and came across a discussion on programming languages, some cool generative artwork, an article on continuations, and i learned of david attenborough's new documentary on bioluminescence.
and i recently went to a design conference where i saw bret victor give a great talk. i found out about the conference on twitter.
This is the sort of experience I’m looking for. Specifically, there’s a number of writers/journalists who I’d like to follow and Twitter seems ideal for following them.
So what do you think the causal difference is between your experience and others? Are you just more diligent about curating the list of people you follow?
i suppose i have a higher bar for clicking follow. and yes, i will unfollow people who annoy me in any way. haha. so i end up having this collection of artists, designers, programmers, musicians, etc. who post interesting content. you can check out who i follow. same username as here.
Like the GP said, to get people angry by getting them to argue publicly using 140 character sarcastic quips (though limit has increased recently). The angrier they get the more they post, the more they post, the angrier others get, and so on. Therefore lots of engagement and activity. With bots around, and some probably with better AI, it is much easier to "engage" a lot more people on a lot more topics at the same time.
And it is interesting to watch because people get into arguments trying to convince each other seemingly but in 140 characters it just sounds insulting and terse. Well sometimes it is simply insulting: "Oh you called me a stupid idiot! Of course, that's a great point. I will step back and ponder an alternative approach to this problem"
You know, the best metaphor I've heard, and how I've started treating it ever since: Twitter is like a cocktail party that you can enter and leave any time of the day, for as long or as short as you'd like. You might participate in some interesting conversations, you might learn about something new, and then when you're done you can leave.
The thing you don't want to do is try to keep up with every tweet. Just follow a bunch of people you find interesting, and once in a while pop in and see what people are talking about.
I tried to make Twitter work for me by only following people I am genuinely interested in. (Founders, CEO's, etc) but even after that I am not engaged.
Most consumption-oriented social media is "like an RSS reader". HN is a news aggregator with a forum bolted onto the bottom of the stories.
What is Facebook? It's an RSS feed of your friends and family's lives. Facebook has replaced Blogger et al, which primarily syndicated through actual RSS, because it was an accessible, simple way to a) create a feed and b) allow publishers to retain some control over their content (by e.g. blocking an undesirable consumer).
You had to have some technical competency to set up a blog and an RSS reader, and all Facebook did was fix that and bring the power of syndication to the RSS-incapable masses.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter's value proposition is that it's supposed to be a continuous, temporary real-time vein on whatever is happening at that moment. It doesn't really do a good job of that filling that niche IMO. The only time I've had an impulse to use Twitter is during something like a live news event, and these days I think something like Snapchat does this better (though they're both infuriatingly difficult to access and navigate, decimating their practical utility).
In practice Twitter has regressed to the lowest common denominator of "microblogging". The thing that continues to give it power is its interactivity. Because the messages are so short and feel so quick, Twitter ensures that people will see our message, react, and that hits our feedback loops ASAP, demanding follow-on after follow-on.
One interpretation of today's Twitter is that it's just the unwashed masses clamoring for a fleeting glimpse of attention from someone they admire. This corresponds with Twitter's early adoption as a celebrity messaging platform for actors (iirc Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to get 1M followers).
The only time Twitter's current incarnation is useful is when it allows the everyman to get a message to someone else who would be guarded, e.g., common citizens potentially inciting a credible presidential campaign as in the infamous Russ_Steinberg tweet [0] .
It's depressing to think that so much behavior hinges on this rabid attention-vying, but it's also impossible to deny the power when some otherwise-inaccessible influence is established. I assume this is why people continue to use it, despite the fact that 99% of tweets drop into the void.
Its size has attracted a number of companies or 'significant' individuals that provide regular updates on activities exclusively through this platform. For instance SpaceX, Elon Musk, NASA, etc have chosen to use Twitter as a primary PR platform.
The reason these companies use it as a PR platform is obvious - there's a lot of users. I can't even fathom why it has lots of users though, at least not without mocking the state of society today.
at some level it's similar to instagram/snapchat stories where you can get brief updates from people you know
in other cases entire subcultures that used to exist on forums have mainly moved to twitter, like the fighting game community or somethingawful-style humor
then a lot of people like to use it to follow celebrities, musicians or industry leaders
I don't see how that is "begging the question", which means "to assume the truth of the conclusion of an argument in the premises in order for the conclusion to follow."
Twitter is great for following popular figures and companies. Users can receive news briefs directly from these sources. Often I will read internet journalism about tweets I read a day after I read them on Twitter.
Being on Twitter is like being at an on-call press conference with all of your subjects of interest 24 hours a day. It's actually pretty bad ass. It's not all heavy with prose. It's heavy with meaning.
Unlike my Facebook network, which is almost entirely composed of friends and family, my Twitter network is composed of prominent figures, projects, and companies in which I am intensely interested
For example, I am an American and I have a passing interest in politics. I follow the President of our Great Union, who is an avid tweeter. I prefer to interpret the news as it happens, through my own unique filter and perspective. Later, I read how others interpreted it. It can be a fun contrast and I prefer to be ahead of the punch, so to speak.
I wouldn't call it shitposting but snarky identity-politics (all left, right, up and down) driven replies/tweet storms (which generally have nothing to do with the original post) are why I only look at "what you've missed" every few days on Twitter.
This is a great effort. I wrote about this at the end of January (https://research.satnam.co/2018/01/30/scammers-impersonating...) and was working on a script last month that did the same thing but I was searching the Streaming API for specific keywords that I knew were triggers for their tweets. I set-up a Twitter account to also identify and report these scammers accounts. The problem I was having was I did not account for the variety of currencies that were being utilized, so I had to write new regexes for the different address types. By then, they had switched up tactics and I hadn't followed up on it since.
Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)
While there are issues with Twitter not doing enough to ban bots, the platform is a festinating example of the complexity of balancing free speech and censorship.
Twitter is not an effective discussion platform imo. Facebook, in my experience at least, makes it pretty damned hard to find active, technical communities.
The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios."
If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.
But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.
So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b.
I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)
> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.
If there's one thing I've learned about social media, it's that this totally considerate, natural thought pattern is anathema to the platform vendors.
In the real world, you expect a high Signal-to-Noise ratio, and want to reward people who speak less often because their words become more weighty/significant. Social platforms work on the exact inverse of this principle! They reward high Noise-to-Signal accounts because that keeps the psychological engagement hooks going. The platforms actively punish accounts that aren't continuously, repetitively pushing those buttons. If you ever wonder why the spammiest crap floats to the top, this is why.
We're all just flashing bulbs in the social media slot machine. If we're not frantically flashing, blinking, or otherwise making it difficult for the consumer-gambler to look away, we're not serving the platform's purpose, and we'll be replaced with a bulb that does.
> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’
I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure you could take it any other way. At least in my usage, 'like' is a signal to the poster that I liked their comment/it was a beneficial contribution, whereas 'retweet' is that AND I think it would be useful/interesting to a weirder audience. Retweeting more than likely seems backwards, and more like spam.
> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds.
You can choose to mute retweets from an account without muting the whole account, so that's not too much of a problem. If you retweet too much they can mute your retweets.
Recently something changed though, and now things you Like can also show up in your friend's feeds, and I haven't found any way on the default twitter site to mute those. So Likes can actually be more spammy than retweets now!
> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like?
HN itself suffers from this problem. There is apparently a heavy "controversial" penalty applied to articles that get too many comments relative to their upvotes.
But, commenting is most of HN's functionality. I comment fairly frequently; I certainly don't upvote articles anywhere near as often.
On mastodon I use boosts (similar to retweet) when I want everyone who follows me to see a specific post. Like is when I find the specific toot interesting but not something I want to bother other people with.
I have an account like that. I just retweet and like stuff sort of like a public bookmarking system. I just go through them when I get enough leisure. I wonder if having a profile photo would help avoiding false positives.
Well, they're obviously not the only criteria, as the text you mention was immediately preceded by "Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts... "
There are many adult actresses, camgirls, etc. on Twitter that are trying to build a following that would still meet this criteria. Not all of them are bots.
We have so many better systems with tons of literature. We -- us, the humans in bulk, as a species with brains -- have so, so many things figured out for this.
Googling for "random walk" and "sybil attack" will dump so many solid research papers in our laps it's just a tragedy nobody can be arsed to do something useful.
This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.
I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.
I upvoted because I assume you meant that verification would be optional. I believe Twitter is actually moving toward that solution.
I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.
I couldn't agree more. If there are more accounts than people in a region, you know you have robots registering. They need to employ better captcha and verification for registering new accounts.
I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.
I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.
Suppose someone has divergent interests. Maybe they are interested in computing and hunting. If they want to discuss things and cultivate a following in each of these communities, should they be required to tweet both from the same account?
What if there isn't a lot demographic overlap? Twitter doesn't provide any kind of tooling that would allow one to follow only the relevant tweets in a given account. This is especially relevant if the interests/communities at issue not only don't have a lot in common, but actually spend a lot of time at odds, which is the case for many interests. It'd be impossible to have some followers from such groups who wanted to hear about the one thing without simultaneously alienating them by talking about the other thing. Computing and hunting are good examples because your average cypherpunk's opinion and worldview is much different from your average hunter's opinion and worldview.
I have personally started a handful of different Twitter accounts intended to engage with different communities. None of these perform any automatic activity at all and I basically use them for a couple of days and then give up because it's too much effort (recently, more because Twitter blocks the accounts almost-immediately).
More accounts than people is absolutely not a reliable indicator that "you have robots registering" (especially when businesses etc. are expected to register). That may be a better metric if Twitter provided useful filtration tools, but even then it'd be shoddy.
I don't think the scheme under discussion requires a one to one relationship between accounts and pieces of ID. Just that, to get the blue badge or whatever, any account should have an identified 'real person' (or company etc) behind it.
If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams.
Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed.
Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative.
This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots.
It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers.
Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
> And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed.
Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much.
So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.
They don't bother, it's not worth trying to target people who actually check things. The scam tweet usually links to what amounts to a phishing page for crypto transaction tracking sites. It looks very real.
The sort of person that would check transaction histories is not the sort of person that's going to believe, even for a second, that "@e10nmussk" asking for people to send them money is genuine. I would expect all those transactions are genuine. There's a lot of naive people in this world and they seem attracted to Twitter like flies to a light.
I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon.
But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.
"n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida."
Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
It's an understatement say that the development of critical thinking skills in US schools is lacking. For example, it's estimated that 1 out of 3 Americans believe that all life has existed in it's present form since the beginning of time.[1] Educating these people is difficult because they are trained by their parents and religious leaders to mistrust professors[2] and other experts from an early age. It's much easier to ban bots.
That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude.
That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking.
So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.
A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.
> There is a question of aptitude... the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.
At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?
Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.
First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.
And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.
But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.
Undermining any kind of trust in democratic institutions seems like a possible goal of these manipulations, especially if Russia is involved. It shores up the argument for “managed democracy” as Putin calls it, and gives autocrats something to point and laugh at when challenged on their autocracy. If rational people start to think in terms of historically failed and discredited notions of government, that’s a boon to any adversary of democratic nations.
> Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
Because that's not the root problem. This is all a dog and pony show.
There is no transparent mechanism of control for internet publishing like there is for e.g. broadcast media via FCC licensure. The government very much wants to rein in this "Wild West" age of the internet and assert some control over the messaging.
Conditions are very favorable for such a project right now:
a) Centralization on walled gardens like Facebook, Google, et al provides a plausible choke point.
[Right now they're making everything else online "dirty", "bad", and/or "Russian", but don't be surprised when they ban it all together and anything non-Google-or-Facebook-approved becomes part of the "dark web", meaning the place that only dirty, bad Russians go, and which will effectively require special communication equipment to access. Wikileaks is a great case study in this.]
b) There's sufficient angst among the tech-savvy public to fly such controls in under the ironic pretext of "preserving the integrity of our democracy" without stirring up too much of a ruckus.
and c) The mainstream media is looking for any plausible cover story they can find after their disastrous and embarrassing coverage of the 2016 election and will go along with anything that will allow them to save a shred of face. That it paints their main competition (hyper-specialized online media) as dirty and unreliable is a bonus.
This is all very bad stuff, and that people are so easily tricked into following along because they're bitter about a political loss is as deeply disappointing as it is predictable.
I expect that the government will eventually move to establish a set of "identity verification standards" that have to be met or the site will be taken offline by court order. This will essentially end free speech on the web and allow the government to assert its control over what normal people are allowed to access, read, and/or share online.
Bottom line is that you don't have to be a Russian double-agent to be a Republican, and you don't have to be the victim of a pernicious foreign plot to lose an election against the other national political party. If you live in the Silicon Valley bubble, don't let your frustration delude you into believing otherwise.
I have a pretty good idea on who is going to decide which person is too stupid to vote in such a society — I mean, you must be pretty stupid in the first place to even consider voting for anyone else than the most powerful party/government, right?
The basic idea underlying democracy is not that people are intelligent enough to make the right choices, but that they have the right to choose their government regardless of their intelligence. Even if that means you end up with people like George W. Bush junior or Donald Trump in the White House.
I am still somewhat shocked that Donald Trump is really President of the USA[1], but I am deeply convinced that denying arbitrary people their right to vote is an acceptable "solution".
>Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion?
Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact.
But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence?
Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president.
>If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans
False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.
They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.
This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
I suspect their big problem is more that their site is too big for the moderation staff they have at the moment. Identifying bots is easy for people sure, but it's hard to automate with AI and hiring people to proactively hunt out and shut down bots is expensive.
Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.
I disagree. At least it shouldn't be that hard for a company with Twitter's level of engineering and data science sophistication, and yes, I do realize that most of their best technical talent is long gone.
Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.
I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
> Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.
There's an open call for papers/proposals for handling the deluge. "Funding will be provided as an unrestricted gift to the proposer's organization(s)" ... "Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission" https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
If only Twitter didn't obliterate the "third-party market" that existed in the Twitter ecosystem in the early days. I imagine we'd be seeing all sorts of solutions against bots by now, especially in third-party Twitter clients.
But no, Twitter had to "take matters in its own hands" and "control the ecosystem". Much good that brought.
It's odd that they mentioned Norwegian at all. Nothing wrong with Norwegian of course, but the researchers are Swedish, and "jakten" means "the hunt" in Swedish just like Norwegian.
Is it just a coincidence that jakten means both hunt and yacht in Norge? (I think I unpicked that chain correctly)
Also, now I come to think about it, it is a bit embarrassing that we (en) pronounce yacht as "yot". I look forward to reading a future man page describing yacht as an archaic form of the correct usage. The man page for the ls command used to describe colour as an archaic term for the "modern" form - color!
Wiktionary says that yacht stems from the Dutch word for a hunting ship (one you use to pursue other ships), so various Germanic languages having similar or identical pronunciations for the words for yacht and hunt is no coincidence.
In the early days of twitter, Trust&Safety was considered the second-lowest team on the totem pole of engineering career advancement possibilities (sorry Internal Tools aka Developer Productivity).
I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations.
Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.
Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have already engineered.
I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.
> it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it?
Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)
It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.
I just hope something similar to a follow graph/follow range comes up as a solution. It gives _way_ more control to individuals to limit the reach of bad actors.
I frankly don't use twitter much anyway... I mostly post things that I like, and in the end use my own account to re-find stuff I posted later... it's a bad bookmark manager is how I use it, but at least then other people might find it useful to.
This whole bot thing is turning into a classic hysteria.
I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'.
There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1].
There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating.
The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media).
[1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
They report them. And then nothing happens because its in the interest of Twitter's business to not do anything about it.
To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users.
I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.
It's frustrating that the site markup is (almost) correct[1], because IMO the browser is in the wrong here. I think it makes more sense for the browser to copy the text as it is in the markup, because all-caps is a stylistic choice not a content choice.
I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy, and that makes sense. But I maintain that the same article with different stylesheets should produce the same text content on the page for the user to copy.
[1]: The markup is in something approaching title case, except that words like `with` are also capitalized. Then the element is using `text-transform: uppercase`.
> I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy
This is almost never the case for headers and such. New York Times or CNN have fancy logos/headlines, but we don't want to reproduce them each time we refer to the company or specific article - we just want the content. text-transform is a great way to achieve presentation need (bold headlines) without messing up content. Copying - excepting cases of visual copying, e.g. screenshot - should always have an option of content-only copying.
That's why the piece is cute, it presents some personal fiddling as a possible solution. Twitter can't simply use a competitor's technology at scale, and if they did they would be opening a massive risk vector to their core business. The only takeaway is that Twitter has to replicate the most intelligent "ai" in the world.
Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?
It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon.
There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.
Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.
It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.
Mastodon is a federated system like StatusNet/GNU Social.
So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?
I find that hard to believe.
ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
I have no opinion on its ability to replace Twitter, but the federated nature of Mastodon means that an instance can disconnect from the instances that are hosting spam accounts, much the same as many instances have disconnected from servers that host racist and alt-right communities and accounts.
Why do we need to identify and ban those in the first place?. When I used Twitter I never thought "oh man, these spam bots are ruining my twitter experience". It was more like "Oh, another bot is following me". Didn't waste more than 2 seconds of my day.
Regardless of the technical measures, I think we can all agree something called 'Mastodon' will be safe from spam bots in perpetuity simply by virtue of not having any non-geek users.
"Hey Melissa, here's my Mastodon handle, hit me up."
"Your... what?"
"My Mastodon, it's a federated social network free from any corporate overlord!"
As opposed to the service that litterally has "twit" in the name? Or the nonsense that has been search engine naming conventions (Google, yahoo, bing, etc)? I think you overestimate the ability for society to accept a name.
Yes, of course. However, if I'm not mistaken, each Mastodon server instance creates their own policies regarding what other servers can tweet to their users. So it would be trivial for any Mastodon server to "ban" Twitter users from posting in their instance.
Maybe even use your hacker powers to spin up a Mastodon instance of your own so your friends have somewhere to go where they know the person running it.
