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Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
- chrisvogt 10y agoI get follows from obvious bots (bio: "click here for 5000 follows") very regularly on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Instagram almost always removes the account, Facebook has always responded the account "doesn't violate the rules", and Twitter I'm not sure about, but I always block and report that garbage.
- danso 10y agoThis seems like a pretty straightforward thing to identify. I remember when the NYT's story, "The Agency", was published [0], some of the fake accounts it had mentioned were still up. Even though the accounts in that story were actually populated by real people, the sockpuppetry was pretty easy to identify. One: the accounts' past tweets right up until they started spreading the news about the fake U.S. disaster were in Russian. Two, all of the tweets of the fake news had almost exactly the same number of favorites and retweets (around 300), and you could see that everyone in that cluster was just retweeting each other. I'm more fascinated by the spam by Facebook accounts. These show up all the time in relatively popular comment sections, and yet apparently FB doesn't care, or the problem is trickier to automatically flag. For example, this comment [1] is clearly spam...but if you click through to the account, it seems to be a real person [1], with a normal-seemingly friend network, mundane photos of life that aren't obviously stock photography. There are a few junk comments (a bunch of "hi's", but as an outsider, this is what makes FB a lot trickier to analyze, because you don't know how much privacy that user has enabled on their own account. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html [1] http://imgur.com/a/Rr8d3 http://imgur.com/a/Rr8d3 [2] https://www.facebook.com/gulfam.raj https://www.facebook.com/gulfam.raj
- ceejayoz 10y agoI wonder how many of those Facebook spam comments are entirely real accounts that've been compromised (access tokens and/or logins). Would make them even harder to detect.
- kbenson 10y agoYou don't even need that. You just need a bunk chrome extension or local spyware and they can easily redirect the occasional FB comment through a remote infected node which is a real person, likely logged into facebook, of which they likely have access to hundreds of thousands. Let the person change their FB credentials all they want to try to get out of that.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoThis happens some on the Twitter side as well. I've had two friends accounts get hacked and turned into subtle spam bots.
- edgarvaldes 10y agoIs it not counter-productive to state "this is not a fake and not a scammer and not report this" in that Facebook comment?
- CaptSpify 10y agoDoes FB really have an incentive to care though? Obviously it should dilute the effectiveness of their advertising system, but if people still keep throwing money at them... I'm not in that industry , so I'm genuinely asking
- throwaway91111 10y agoThey seem to based on enforcement of their real name policy. Granted, if they don't click on ads, they may not care....
- sitkack 10y agoBots must have real names. This is purely for marketing purposes so they can tie you back to meat space.
- wmorein 10y agoI've seen a lot of cases of people's accounts being cloned and then being used to re-friend their friends. I've always wondered a bit about what they are going to be used for and I suspect this is one of the potential options.
- pfarnsworth 10y agoThey will contact the friends list and ask for money because they got into an accident, foreign country, etc. This happened to my wife and her friends, but luckily no one fell for it.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y agoSome users don’t care when they grant a Facebook app the right to post on their behalf. Or, users type their login credentials into a phishing site which then can log into the account and send spam. The account would look like a real person because it is a real person.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Zikes 10y ago> A Twitter spokesman said the social network had clear policy on automation that was "strictly enforced". > Users were barred from writing programs that automatically followed or unfollowed accounts or which "favourited" tweets in bulk, he said. I am constantly getting followed by accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of follows and followers, usually checkmarked accounts though I've never heard of them. It's painfully obvious these verified users are using bots to randomly follow people, both to spam my inbox with "you have a new follower" messages and to encourage people to "follow back". But Twitter does nothing about it. It's not "strictly enforced" at all.
- ryandrake 10y agoI have a twitter account but never use it (in fact never tweeted anything). Every few years or so I get curious and log in and, lo and behold, I have 10-20 more followers than I did last time. Not sure if they are fake, bots, random people, who knows?
- mtgx 10y agoI think this story is getting more coverage than the one from a few months ago that showed that, for instance, both Clinton and Trump had millions of fake accounts following them: > Per eZanga, 4.3 million—or 39 percent—of Trump's more than 11 million Twitter followers as of August came from fake accounts while the other 6.7 million are actually real users. And for Clinton, 3.1 million—or 37 percent—of her more than 8 million followers were fake while 5.3 million come from real accounts. http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/more-third-presidential-candidates-twitter-followers-are-reportedly-fake-173628 http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/more-third-presidentia... 350,000 is about 0.1% of Twitter's user base. Does anyone here think the number of fake accounts isn't orders of magnitude higher than that?
- investjtravolta 10y agohttp://socialpuncher.com/business/the-synchronized-fake-race-2016/ http://socialpuncher.com/business/the-synchronized-fake-race... Twitter audience growth of the presidential candidates in 2016
- stevesearer 10y agoAnecdotally I've seen a huge uptick in spam/bots following my main account on Twitter since the beginning of the year. Probably 50%+ of my new followers have been accounts with no profile picture, no tweets, and close to zero followers.
- ceedan 10y ago- messages being posted only from Windows phones The smoking gun. What real person still has one of those. Disclaimer: I owned a Nokia Lumia 920 for > 2 years.
- syntheticnature 10y agoA good friend of mine, who is a real, dyed-in-the-wool, oldschool Microsoft fanatic (it's an amusing quirk to me) still has and uses his. That said, swarms of Windows Phones does smell funny.
- ascagnel_ 10y agoMaybe the OAuth token for a popular WP app got leaked, and now anyone can authenticate with it?
- akjainaj 10y agoAll OAuth tokens, even the official ones, are leaked at this point. Google them.
- yawz 10y agoThis! :) :) :)
- avip 10y agoThe only surprising detail here is the small number mentioned (350K). Twitter fake accounts are expected to be counted in MMs.
- jashkenas 10y agoI would imagine that it's possible that some of the people reading these comments might already know a lot more detail about Twitter/Facebook bots than this story goes into. Although you fine folks might remember me from a few other projects, I'm currently a Graphics Editor at The New York Times. We're actively curious and interested in pursuing lines of inquiry about this sort of behavior, and if any HN'ers have any interesting leads or tips, I'd encourage you to get in touch. You can reach me at my username @nytimes.com, or email me and I'll send you my Signal number.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- startupdiscuss 10y agoIf you want another angle on the story, consider non-bot bots. (aka "sock puppets") You have an argument with someone on twitter and the next second 4 or 5 newly formed eggs with 1 follower apiece pile in to defend the other POV, sometimes without regard to civility. It could be a coincidence. Or it could be that the person you were debating let their ID out in another way. Edit: Just to be clear, I was talking about the Freudian "Id" in all caps, used these days as a short-hand for a sort of unfiltered emotional inner child, and not "I.D." which is short for identification.
- jashkenas 10y agoThere are certainly a great many interesting angles ;) For a neat paper that actually has some nice hard evidence about what government production of social posts can look like, check out Gary King and co. at Harvard's exploration of Zhanggong, China: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf We summarized it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/business/international/china-fifty-cent-party-internet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/business/international/ch...
- eternalban 10y agohttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644v1.pdf "China". To think I used to actually pay for your paper in my errant youth! :)
- niftich 10y agoI'm not surprised. This has been a phenomenon for a very, very long time [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11905266#11906591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11905266#11906591 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170433 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485659 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525638 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501654 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996790 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833188 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346386
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y agoBot accounts, not fake accounts. I don't even know what the latter means—plenty of people don't associate twitter with their real name. And why would you! Secondly, of course there are this many. There are probably many more. I run several bots myself; there's nothing wrong with this. Twitter's TOS is only as good as its enforcement, and if there's anything twitter is terrible at, it's having any control over its community.
- cblock811 10y agoA fake account on social media (as far as I have seen) can be things like alter-egos. There was a subculture on Facebook of making fake 'emo' accounts. They used to clog up my suggested friends list.
- geofft 10y ago"Fake" implies deception: it's fake because it counterfeits or forges something else that is real. An anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account run by a human, in the way that a human is expected to use a Twitter account, is not a fake account: it's real, just pseudonymous. A bot account that's clearly a bot, like @big_ben_clock or @choochoobot, isn't a fake account either: it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. From the article: "These accounts did not act like the bots other researchers had found but were clearly not being run by humans." One thing a network of fake accounts could be doing is inflating follower counts. A follow from a pseudonymous account that corresponds to an actual human isn't fake. Even a constant factor or constant term from a small number of humans with multiple accounts isn't particularly deceptive. But thousands or millions of follows from accounts run by a handful of humans is deceptive. Another thing a fake account could be doing is spreading propaganda by creating the impression that many people agree with a political opinion, when these "people" are just canned responses, or humans assisted by automation (but capable of making human replies across large numbers of accounts).
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y agoDeception is a great feature. Why is that bad? I don't want Twitter to know my name. Don't exclude me for valuing my own privacy! I'm certainly not "fake", and neither are my interactions.
- tristanj 10y agoIn their recent SEC filings, Twitter estimates around 5% of the MAUs are spammers or bots. They also estimate they have 317 million MAUs, which when you work it out gives around 16.7 million monthly spammers or bots. Numbers come from their 2016 Q3 filing https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-26749&CIK=1418091 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...
- astrodust 10y agoI think that's an optimistically low estimate.
- pavanky 10y agoWhy ?
- CharlesW 10y agoIt's not possible to be completely sure that 5% isn't a reality-based estimate, but it's typical for services like Twitter Audit and BotOrNot to identify half or more of a celebrity's followers as bots. For example, as I type this BotOrNot estimates that 34% of @RealDonaldTrump followers, and 48% of @BarackObama followers, are real. Just from being a nobody on Twitter who uses it almost every day, I'd also agree that 5% is laughably optimistic.
- jonknee 10y agoThey are estimating active users, so it's a little hard to compare to follower accounts. A spam account from 4 years ago that followed 1,000 people and stopped would show up in 1,000 different places despite not being an active user.
- pavanky 10y agoWhat makes you think there is no overlap between these bots ?
- monkmartinez 10y agoIt is trivial to create a BOT type twitter account. 1. Get burner email and phone number 2. Post bot to DO, AWS or run it on a raspi 3. ??? 4. Profit from all those sweet followers. Many of them look entirely "real" or they can be hilariously obvious. I would bet it is happening on Facebook, Instagram, Snap and any other social network where "value" is derived from followers/eyeballs.
- BugsJustFindMe 10y agoUCL has dropped the ball on marketing itself. If this had been a student at MIT or Harvard, the article headline would have started with "MIT/Harvard Researcher ..." instead of burying the school's name in tiny print in the middle of the article.
- epistasis 10y agoThat's true for most universities. Some universities get billing in the headline, most do not. This is not a function of the press department, but about the editor's perception of the public's perception.
- failrate 10y agoOh, it's a lot more than 350k.
- investjtravolta 10y agohttp://socialpuncher.com/top-100/how-many-primitive-bots-follow-top-100/ http://socialpuncher.com/top-100/how-many-primitive-bots-fol... Percent of 1 level bots is 59,33%. The total number of unique level 1 bots is 310,537,272. Almost 60% of Twitter Top-100 audience is a cheap poor-quality imitation.
- debt 10y agoThis is a great way to spread fake news and get people to see it/engage with it.
- andai 10y agoDon't know why you were downvoted, as this is one of the most important uses of bots. Maybe people are sick of hearing the term. There also seems to be some confusion about its meaning and its purpose.
- campuscodi 10y agoOn the same topic. I think he might have discovered the same botnet. http://sadbottrue.com/article/51/ http://sadbottrue.com/article/51/
- ceedan 10y agoTo me, it seems like a set of QA/test accounts for Twitter to do load testing and whatnot.
- devindotcom 10y agoWhat an interesting story. Mysterious and strange. I'm going to ask about this.
- clarkenheim 10y agoif youve not read it already, here is an excellent interview with Andrés Sepúlveda who has helped to "rig elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade" partly through using twitter bots and similar techniques. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-elect...
- OliverJones 10y agoHuh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted. It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need to clean up their acts.
- fokov 10y agoDoes anyone know if any of the social media sites have release info on their relative bot counts? I'm curious because I've seen the same posts in different places and now see a ton of comments boiling down to "Source?" again. The later used to be everywhere 8-9 years ago, but were typically people that actually wanted a source to read not just spam the question. Now it seems they are spamming it to distract from the real conversations.
- will_pseudonym 10y agoNo, because they report on growth of active users, which include bots. Their stock price would be reduced if they disclosed bot account numbers.
- highstep 10y agoThey also profit on bots through their ad networks.
- doctorshady 10y agoI get your analogy, but the great thing about landlines is you can selectively forward unwanted callers to anything you feel like. Social media websites don't tend to have anything like that.
- pjc50 10y agoI've never encountered this feature myself. While social media at least has "block" and "report". And the collaborative API-driven blocklists used against organised troll attacks. Even USENET has a better killfile than my landline.
- rch 10y agoSpam was a serious and growing problem before the major providers got serious about filtering. For now I just report clickbait feeds as spam and hope for the best.
- andai 10y agoI thought, "ha, he'd need a botnet to make any noticeable impact", when I thought, has anyone thought of that? Using a network of bots to detect and report obvious bot accounts.
- nicolas314 10y agoIn the same spirit, there is at least one botnet dubbed Linux/Moose [1] dedicated to penetrating home routers for the sole purpose of creating fake followers on social networks. [1] http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/11/02/linuxmoose-still-breathing http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/11/02/linuxmoose-still-br...
- rch 10y agoPossible to automate, but limiting your report/block activity to spam-accounts that follow your real account would have the most impact.
- jimnotgym 10y agoI found it interesting that a Member of parliament on twitter had hundreds of obvious bot followers. I presumed he was buying 'popularity'. Maybe more sinister. Lots of them very recent
- stordoff 10y agoHundreds out of how many? I get a fair number of bot followers on an account I don't really care about.
- sjs382 10y agoThere was a "Ask HN:" post about Twitter bots the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497235 Strange that these bots aren't spammy but are posting every minute or two. I wonder what they're for... https://twitter.com/superpolice001 https://twitter.com/superpolice001 https://twitter.com/superpolice002 https://twitter.com/superpolice002 https://twitter.com/superpolice003 https://twitter.com/superpolice003
- dceddia 10y agoAlmost like one of those RSA/Google Authenticator/etc rotating numbers... always 6 characters, seemingly random, somewhat pronounceable. Weird.
- andai 10y agoWhat does it remind you of? I haven't used GA. They're following the format 'bababa', where 'b' is a random consonant and 'a' is a random vowel.
- throwanem 10y agoOr like a numbers station. Twitter would make a lot of sense for that, actually.
- sjs382 10y agoIndeed! That was my first thought and was the reason that Ask HN post stuck with me. See also: https://theawl.com/the-real-weird-twitter-is-espionage-twitter-3eb3e07abc04#.swwu8dl4l https://theawl.com/the-real-weird-twitter-is-espionage-twitt...
- acqq 10y agoAs it is twitted exactly every 2 minutes it can actually be a kind of current confirmation or authentication code.
- funnyfacts365 10y ago
- gesman 10y agoThere is a whole industry of buying and selling social media "followers". So I guess this is a product of this.
- dxhdr 10y agoTwitter says 5% of their MAUs are bots but this surely an underestimate. Facebook estimates nearly 9% fake users which is also likely too conservative. Bot traffic in ad fraud is even higher (30+%? every study is different, seems difficult to measure). So we have 5-9% as a lower bound and perhaps we can look at e-mail for an upper bound with nearly 60% spam by volume.
- ohnotthatguy 10y agoAnyone on twitter could've told you that. When you're followed by "@hotttladie3" & "hotttladie453892", it's only reasonable to assume there is also an @hotttladie4 through @hotttladie452891. The problem with having a user reporting based plan for acting against fake accounts in an environment where the psychological motivations of using the service, if not to disseminate news, or maintain a closet standup comedian habit, is affirmation. In almost every motivation for using the service, the user has an incentive to keep their numbers up, whether they are real or not. A huge part of the game is the number of followers. Personally I'm just surprised that they've moved from advertising cam sites (which could conceivably act as a secondary, almost passive income) to quoting star wars novels while inflating numbers for people who pay for followers. That's the aspect that confuses me, and makes me feel vulnerable.
- andai 10y agoWhich part of that confuses you? If it was the quoting SW part, my understanding is that they used that as a simple source of human language.
- sergiotapia 10y agoTwitter has become unbearable to use for news. Every single submission from news stations to President Trump is filled with combo-replies from people. 1 dude will bombard the tweet, then a chick, then a different guy. Example: http://i.imgur.com/zbyM7YG.png http://i.imgur.com/zbyM7YG.png You need to scroll down at least 5 load-more's to see regular people tweets. It's a really terrible user experience that Twitter needs to solve.
- iamatworknow 10y ago>You need to scroll down at least 5 load-more's to see regular people tweets. I personally don't find much added value in those tweets, "regular people" or not. They're basically YouTube comment level at this point.
- andai 10y agoAnd it was at this moment andai that realised, that YouTube comments are written by regular people.
- iamatworknow 10y ago"YouTube comments = garbage" is basically a meme now but I certainly find most general usage public internet comments, especially relating to politics, to be largely unreadable. That may come off as sounding elitist, but low effort opinion spamming is really not my cup of tea.
- ReverseCold 10y agoOh really? I've seen a lot of bot like activity
- andai 10y agoI meant (with a great sadness in my heart) that YouTube comments do indeed come from relatively ordinary members of the human species. I might be wrong, but I don't think we can simulate flame wars yet.
- nostrademons 10y agoNo kidding. I remember when I first moved to the Bay Area in 2009, I met a smart guy at a startup meetup, a serial entrepreneur with a previous exit. I asked him what he was working on, and he said "Oh, I've been writing a Twitter bot that will follow people of your choosing, engage them in simple conversation, and retweet their tweets. It's building a network of followers - I don't know yet what I'd do with that, but it's an asset that's likely valuable to somebody." I ran into him again a few weeks later, and he'd sold the company. I think I'd heard from either him or someone here on Hacker News, around that time, that 75% of Twitter traffic was bots and automated accounts. Note that that was early 2009, before Twitter went mainstream and when they still had a really easy-to-use developer API.
- econner 10y agoI'd believe it. For what it's worth, something like 80% - 90% of all email is spam. It's usually better to leave it there and cordon it off so that real users don't notice it. Spammers don't get feedback that their spam isn't being shown to real users. Also 350,000 accounts is hardly "massive" as the clickbait title suggests. No way that can account for more than a small percentage of traffic.
- austinjp 10y agoIt's possible that the majority of spam is not meant to be seen by humans, but is instead designed to train spam filters and keep them busy, so some payload still penetrates the shield.
- banku_brougham 10y agoI enjoy stories about this, they dont show up here often because its assumed to be a solved problem. But the spam wars continue!
- thomasthomas 10y agoMAUs affect their stock price. MAUs are in their 10k IIRC, does the SEC look into this? i'm not sure.
- chubot 10y agoThis has become obvious to me after getting a few blog posts at the top of HN. I just search for my domain on Twitter, and there are dozens of "people" who do nothing but retweet hacker news articles. They are presumably doing this for some kind of "reverse" reputation. I'm interested if anyone has any more insight on this phenomenon. Maybe it's as simple as convincing some naive users to follow them with links vetted as high quality. Examples: https://twitter.com/bartezzini https://twitter.com/bartezzini (123K tweets, nothing but HN-type links and comments) https://twitter.com/EggmanOrWalrus https://twitter.com/EggmanOrWalrus (15.7k tweets, ditto) https://twitter.com/MarkBeacham https://twitter.com/MarkBeacham
- pfarnsworth 10y agoIs this really a surprise? I don't even use Twitter, and I have 4 different Twitter accounts. The amount of fake accounts must be staggering, but there's no way Twitter will cull them otherwise their MAU numbers will tank, and along with it, their ad rates, etc.
- EJTH 10y agoI thought this was obious to everyone with a twitter account? I get random bot follows all the time.
- EJTH 10y agoMeanwhile Twitter banned yet another political youtuber @SargonOfAkkad, doesn't seem like he did anything against Twitters ToS. Fed up with Twatter to be honest.
- orionblastar 10y agoYeah I watched a few of his videos on Youtube. He makes fun of feminists and sjws in his videos, so Twitter doesn't like that stuff and call it harassment or bullying or whatever.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe question this sort of thing leaves me with is "Why does {Twitter/Facebook/Google} permit this? What are they getting out of it?" Its pretty clear what the bot guys get out of it, pay to promote services, pay for followers, etc. They can monetize "fame" through the robotic horde. But as this article and ones before it point out, these networks are generally quite easy to spot. So why not take them out? It probably isn't because they can pad 'subscriber growth' or 'MAU' numbers, they appear to be only small components of that number. And while I could imagine it may be hard to purge them at the moment, its been a problem long enough that someone in engineering must have figured out a system for taking down large numbers of accounts. The only thing I can come up with, and it is way too tin-hattish to really count, is that it creates an "observable" for the underside of the Internet. By watching what people are asking the twitter bots to do you can observe other objectives that are perhaps less observable. There are some obvious customers for that but I don't think they actually pay for that (except perhaps by buying access to the Firehose)
- swiley 10y agoPeople who make money by being popular probably like it.
- mike_hearn 10y agoThey don't "permit" this. I used to work on anti-bot technology at Google and we put a lot of effort into fighting botting, in particular on Gmail. We were quite successful at the time. Bot controlled accounts went from being a problem that was threatening the viability of the service to being fairly trivial. I don't know what it's like these days. Anti-abuse teams tend to be relatively small. We aren't talking hundreds of engineers here, we're talking like maybe 10-15 engineers. When you look at the relative effectiveness of different networks, you can be comparing something as trivial and random as whether one or two people happened to figure out a good strategy or not. There is no need for conspiracy theories. The costs of accounts on different networks is a reasonable proxy for effectiveness at bot fighting. My favourite site has always been this one: https://buyaccs.com/ https://buyaccs.com/ From a quick check it seems Twitter is getting better at it. Prices used to be more like in the low $20/k range. Now the low end accounts are $45/k and if you want PVAd/profiled it's up near $90. Compare to Gmail where the price is more like $280/k. Or Facebook EN accounts, $120. Good to see my old colleagues doing such a good job! In the case of Twitter, my view is that their relatively low performance on botting is a side effect of the whole social justice / campus politics movement. I heard from a friend who works there that their focus was switched almost entirely to fighting human abuse like people being nasty to each other, political extremism, terrorism, etc. If you remember, just a few years ago Twitter was being attacked in the media for being filled with trolling and nastyness. So of course that became their priority. Anti-botting took a back seat. Nowadays there's suddenly a bout of anti-Russian hysteria. Suddenly bots are in focus again. There are conspiracy theories about botted accounts being used to convince people to change their political positions. Having worked in the industry for years I am deeply skeptical about this. I never once saw bots being used for political ends or anything even approaching it. There is a lot of disinformation out there about Russia right now from western sources, and a lot of paranoia that doesn't seem to be justifiable. I'd guess RT does far, far more to create pro-Russian support than anything happening on Twitter does.
- econner 10y ago350,000 accounts is not a "massive network". This is all hype.
- mtkd 10y agoin '08 or '09 I met a guy who was creating 100s or more accounts and paying an overseas outsourcing company to curate longterm timelines properly (so not just spam) he genuinely didn't know why he was doing it at the time (he'd been heavily involved in gaming Google rankings previously for credit card companies) and it was at significant cost - but he was completely sure at some point it would be useful
- KirinDave 10y agoI'm just amazed at this entire series of threads. "Gosh, who knew violating social network ToS by proxy and creating massive false consensus networks was so easy?" Everyone. Everyone should know. We're watching this terrible trend rip apart the entire social proposition of the internet after spending 2 decades trying and finally achieving buy in. And here y'all are, hopefulls for a digital economy cheerfully defrauding the very networks that will probably bet the monetization strategy for many startups that pass through HN's doors. The total lack of any personal responsibility here, or notion of consequence... It stuns me.
- LightskinKanye 10y agoThe Tragedy of the Commons states that I am free to exploit this flaw. But we as a society should probably do something about it
- KirinDave 10y agoYou are what I am talking about. You are part of society. Your obligation is not only to find better ways to stop it but to NOT DO IT. We are all free to make terrible choices that hurt others. That doesn't mean we're compelled to do so because, "Welp, I guess that's just how it goes."
- LightskinKanye 10y agoEasy for you to say when you've had a company of yours acquired for millions. What about those that are struggling to find a place to sleep, not give our lives up to commuting, and pay our student debts? What about the Rights Approach to ethics? Don't I have a right to be able to eat? What I am saying is that we as a society (but mostly the leadership of Twitter) should act to make their service not a Common ground to be exploited.
- inimino 10y agoNo, idiot, the tragedy of the commons is a tragedy, not an ethical license.
- 10y ago
- throwaway112991 10y agothis is relevant is as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hitwe.android&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hitwe.andr... tldr: 'HitWe' it's a tinder-like dating app with 10M+ installs on google play (haven't checked itunes). i came across it by browsing dating apps for fun. most of the bad reviews (1-2 stars) are from people who claim it's 95% fake profiles etc. many claim that women there just ask for their email etc. some even claim to have paid some of the women which have then disappeared (but that's being too naive, IMO. never pay someone you have never met.. ). there are many many good reviews, but most are only with 5 stars and without any text (which, to me, is another red flag). anyway - the most interesting part here is that they actually managed to fool google, up until this very moment! google recommended me to view their app.. spam does work ! ps - googling (ironic, i know) 'hitwe app scam' showed me this on the first result: http://www.datingbusters.com/hitwe-com-exposed-for-fake-profiles-throughout-their-site/ http://www.datingbusters.com/hitwe-com-exposed-for-fake-prof... i am interested in a response from one of google play's spam engineers/managers .. edit: spelling edit2: it took me 0.5 secs to start sensing that it's a fake-boosted app. a human reviewer at google could have just scanned the top 100x dating apps in a single day and map out the fake apps. what do you think?
- ggggtez 10y agoFor everything people dislike about curation, you avoid these syble attacks
- dmix 10y agoI remember hearing about this radio host who was competing with another host to get more followers. Then over about a week one of his fans who owned a bot net gave him 100k followers. He sent a DM saying "you're welcome, enjoy". He already had about 250k followers so it wasn't a huge spike in that context but it was interesting to think of the implications of that when you come across a random account with 100k followers and 100 following... they might not be as influential as it seems. Also this was about a year ago and last I checked his follower account was roughly the same. Wasn't there a story on HN about a guy who created a fake identity and twitter account with 20k followers and got invited (and paid?) to speak at a tech conference?
- bikamonki 10y agoTwitter is broken. No news here.
- eternalban 10y agoThe paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf
- saycheese 10y agoRelated research paper, "The 'Star Wars' botnet with >350k Twitter bots": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445289 And another paper covering the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445295
- JohnTHaller 10y agoI thought everybody knew that a big chunk of Twitter works this way. I got to see it in action just a couple weeks ago with a pro-Trump network of fake Twitter accounts. I had the misfortune of having one of those @TrumpRulesMAGA4Eva style Twitter accounts reply to something I'd written with a standard pro-Trump meme. A couple people liked and favorited within an hour or so and then nothing. Then late on a Saturday night several days later, a whole network of Twitter accounts favorited and retweeted it. Most of them had similar style names but some had generic ones or random character strings. About half had an egg profile picture. Many of the others had tried to look legitimate with real names and pictures of people but tineye reverse searches showed 10,000+ hits on the images. Looking at the histories of the accounts, they'd all been used similarly for months.
- pluma 10y agoEverybody talks about bots but let's not forget that there are plenty of bot-like accounts controlled by humans from poor countries for (fractions of) pennies. You don't need a "hacker army", just a couple of bucks and a third-world nation with good enough infrastructure. Look up "click farms". The problem with this is that while bots can be detected (even if doing so is an arms race) it's much harder to detect "bot" humans.
- ensiferum 10y agoStandard stuff, you want media attention for your blog, twitter whatever? You'll need to have a bot army to upvote your own stuff, relink and like your content. Having a botnet is now an essential part of building your social media following.
- eriknstr 10y agoSoundCloud is full of fake accounts. I get a couple of new followers every now and then and it feels like 95% of them have mentions of "buy followers". I always report spam bots whenever I spot them on SoundCloud, Tinder, Facebook and Reddit, so though I only have very few followers on SC I think all of them are real people at least. It is very important to always report spam bots and other types of disruptive fake accounts and I wish that everyone did. If everyone did then it would be less profitable to run such accounts and then there would be fewer of them and we would be bothered much less frequently.
- alphydan 10y agoIn a time where bots and AI are all the rage, it begs the question: Are some bots on twitter more useful and insightful than actual people? I remember a twitter bot (name escames me now) which would crawl pastebin and tweet updates when passwords / DBs were leaked. It had lots of followers (security researchers who found it very useful). Most humans on twitter are boring and waste people's time with youtube style comments. Most bots are spammy and waste time too. Why not allow both and let people decide who they follow/ban?
- elastic_church 10y agomy bots would never be caught up in these criteria. they've been using NLP for years
- ninrud7 10y agoI agree that if you plan to stay with a cheater don't try to find any information. However, in my case I needed it in my state in order to file for a divorce and come out of the relationship. You can't just say I think courts want proof or you end up spending a lot of time and money to fight it out! Finding out was hard, but I was relieved that I wasn't crazy and it's making my divorce go a lot smoother. He would never confess; therefore, I did the best thing for me...find out, no doubt, move on!!!contact hotcyberlord@gmail.com.. or text his phone +15402277725 he's a professional and will surely help you out,tell him from Ninah
- dbrian82 10y agohi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (hotcyberlord425@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck