Can you link a few examples where: "If you tweet something along the lines of "I'd buy a tshirt with that image on it" you'll immediately get ten bots offering to sell you that shirt from a print-on-demand site."?
There should be thousands upon thousands of examples, a single search away, to choose from right?
That is what the second link is. Most of those replies are fake, you can tell because there are bots working in call-and-answer pairs, with one stating their admiration for a shirt design and the second one providing a storefront that has miraculously spontaneously generated to fit that product demand.
For the second link in your previous comment, only 4 accounts posted the same link 5 times total, and only one of the accounts looks suspicious enough to be a bot, the others have join dates of 2011, 2012, etc., and not too suspicious posting histories.
Did you actually take a close look? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
Your analysis is wrong. @livpost_br, @cosasdevida_13, @humseila, and @Steven_Mr9 are all bots. Early reg dates and retweeting of the content of others does not prove an account is not a bot. If you actually skim those accounts' replies more carefully, you will see the spamming of t-shirt links.
I concede that may not have been the best example. Did you actually read my comment in full? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
That bot shouldn't have even gotten as far as to spam all of those tweets in the first place. You'd think they would have created a more bot-proof account signup process. Not to mention, that thread was made on 10/21, there's no telling how many days it took for it to be suspended after someone had to make a thread about it.
As the other poster pointed out, the signup was years ago for some of them so it’s unfair to blame current management for that. I would encourage you to report any bots you notice though. And as Elon said they will make mistakes. As we all know bots versus humans is an eternal arms race, not much new here.
> You'd think they would have created a more bot-proof account signup process
So you’re concerned about the signup process at sign up time.
Sorry to edit but I wasn’t clear before and can’t reply.
I just don’t see these. I think they are buried deep in threads that aren’t surfaced. Only by searching specifically can you find them. That’s pretty much what Elon planned: freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
Also it seems reasonable to speculate that these particular bots are not prioritized to the extent that they are directly addressing specific requests on essentially (often) leaf nodes of conversations.
Reg date proves nothing. Accounts can be shared, sold, or hacked.
> As we all know bots versus humans is an eternal arms race, not much new here.
Calls into question claims that there have been substantiative gains made in that arms race, though- which is the point of this sub-thread in the first place!
As I said I don't see spam on the site (other than these deep leaf node posts surfaceable only by pinpoint targeted searches which is not normal usage) so I think it's gotten a lot better. You so far haven't convinced me that it's worse, but you're free to question things.
The t-shirt monger scam is just one I've heard about secondhand. What really annoys me is I'm somehow stuck on a bot target list where every other tweet I make gets instantaneously hit with at least one like from an account that is clearly a bot. It's sufficiently annoying that I end up doing a dance where I report the account for spam, block it, and then delete and retweet the tweet just to get rid of the fake interaction. So I'm understandably miffed at the degradation of my twitter experience.
