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I 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 sto

I 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
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startupdiscuss 10y ago
If 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 ago
  There 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 ago
    https://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! :)
- DanBC 10y ago
  That's a really unsophisticated sockpuppet. For something more detailed I guess "Can we talk about nowheremom yet" is a good start: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/can-we-talk-about-nowheremom-yet.275172/ https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/can-we-talk-about-nowhe... http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http%3A//forums.anandtech.com/arcmessageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=102468 http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http%3A//forums.an... Or the "DaveonWheels" hoax: http://observer.com/2012/10/meet-hunter-dunn-the-young-man-whose-identity-was-stolen-for-the-dave-on-wheels-hoax/ http://observer.com/2012/10/meet-hunter-dunn-the-young-man-w... http://dave-on-wheels-exposed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dave-on-wheels-exposed-twist-you-never.html http://dave-on-wheels-exposed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dave-on...
- jessewmc 10y ago
  Tangent, but the Freudian id is usually rendered in all lowercase, and your meaning would be much clearer that way.
problems 10y ago
Anyone with $10 can go buy tens of thousands of followers. And they work. And stay for a fair while. I've done this a few times myself, it really doesn't take any more than a quick google search.
- andai 10y ago
  Would you mind sharing why you did it? I've been curious about this for a while.
  - Spoom 10y ago
    One thing I can think of is getting support from the "social media" arm of companies; if they believe you're an "influencer", you're likely to get white glove treatment (and may otherwise be ignored).
  - apocalyptic0n3 10y ago
    Not the OP, but I previously worked for a company that did this. We had tens of thousands of fake accounts on both Twitter and Facebook and had a script that would have them all (or specific sets) follow the same account at random points over the course of a few days (to avoid giving the client a few thousand followers instantly, which might draw attention). I can't remember full details since I wasn't involved, but I think we were charging $10 per 1,000 followers per network. The customers were generally people trying to get their small business out there or some local thinking it could make them into an internet celebrity (I work in/around Scottsdale, AZ and there are a lot of people here that think like that). We had a separate script that would check to make sure each account was still active once a day and if accounts were removed, they would be replenished automatically, although once a client lost a follower, it was gone and a new one didn't replace it for them. It was all kinda shady and it was one of the numerous reasons I left that web agency (which went bankrupt a year later and is no more), but it apparently produced decent results since search ranking increased both on Twitter/Facebook and on Google. I'm unsure if it is still as effective, though; this was almost 4 years ago that I left. Only time I've seen it first hand since was with a client trying to get famous. They made some YouTube videos and bought tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers from somewhere (we don't offer that at my current agency)
frozenport 10y ago
I would like to see more reporting on the poltical forces on Wikipedia.
aresant 10y ago
Could NYT quantify - through experimentation - the value of a bot army as the "story"? For instance a Tweet with 100 retweets is substantially more likely to generate additional retweets / be shown more by Twitter's algorithm / etc vs. a tweet with 10 retweets. And scale that up! Easy to build an experiment and quantify even on a small level for NYT.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  They could have tweeted, paid for a bot army to retweet, then reported on that.
  - scholia 10y ago
    And then gotten criticized for being unethical....
avip 10y ago
Just approach the providers - they have nothing to hide, they are not involved in any illegal activity, and they'll be very happy to have their name dropped in NYT. "Buy social media followers" is a straightforward business.
- facetube 10y ago
  What sort of ethical framework permits this?
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Some ethical frameworks deal in prohibiting/limiting behaviours rather than granting permission. One could argue this is even preferable. Interestingly, as a line of inquiry, it leads to having philosophical difficulties with the Bill of Rights.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      So called "positive rights" and "negative rights[0]" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
_pecl 10y ago
I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums. For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for photos, auto-generated a bunch of bios using a few basic parameters, e.g. "Beer lover, proud parent." Names were easy - the most popular first & last names from census records, mix and match. Grab a few lat/longs and convert them to the biggest US cities and you have a location, find some data source to tweet from (breaking news is easiest) and you have a fully automated, human-like Twitter account. For bonus points, Pick a random color toward the low ends of the hexadecimal range ( rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f) works fine) and you even look like your page is personalized down to the color. Start following random people and 10% follow back (even more if you follow people who are tweeting about similar keywords as you - kindred spirits I guess). The only tricky part is making sure you don't cross lines with your IPs. You could buy/rent them privately, but you really only want to keep a few accounts (3-5) to each IP, so that gets expensive ($.75/IP/month) when you don't have a really good reason to use your accounts. You can scrape free listings for them, but those are nasty, slow, and can cause bans if Twitter decides to take down a whole range or if you are forced to switch IPs too quickly. Device type, browser, etc. is easy to spoof. Should you decide to, it's also really easy to change name, username, and profile picture of an account in the future. So if I wanted a few thousand Trump-supporting (or Trump-hating) sock puppets I could have them today. If you don't want to buy/create/manage Twitter accounts yourself you can get access to what's called a "panel." A panel is basically an automated, coin-operated network of fake accounts that you can control at wholesale prices. Want 5,000 followers? Plug $1/1,000 followers into the panel, supply the username, and you'll have them in a couple of minutes. Or resell 5,000 followers for $25 and pocket the $20 difference. For example of a panel, see this ad on blackhatworld: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel-youtube-facebook-instagram-twitter-and-more-90-services.835185/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel-yout.... Nothing special about this one, just the first I found when I googled. They're a dime a dozen. I'm certain there are millions of fake accounts for every service imaginable.
- 10y ago
sigmar 10y ago
These bots (and human run trolling accounts) have been widely reported on[1], but by many different organizations in different languages. Which seems to have made it not as widely known as it should be. I still see people arguing on twitter with what is clearly a bot. I would like to see someone write the story of the overarching result of what a world will look like in an increasing internet-focused world, when disinformation campaigns can be funded by the highest bidder, and actual individual voices get drained out. [1] Reports of Putin using online troll brigades pre-dates the creation of Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  > when disinformation campaigns can be funded by the highest bidder, and actual individual voices get drained out. Isn't that the normal state of things since Gilgamesh?
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Yeah. They told me the New York Times could be bought for $2.50, but all I got was a stack of paper.
- d0mine 10y ago
  Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia. Consider how it is compatible with the existence of Putin's troll army. At the very least try to imagine the relative scale of money/power involved in the propaganda in the West compared to the rest of the world. (for reference, check military spendings)
  - tw04 10y ago
    >Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia. Why would you assume the troll army is trying to make "Russia" look good? It's far more likely they would focus on individual goals like keeping the US out of Ukraine. Or making us look bad on the international stage to other countries. They don't need to look good, they just need us to look bad. Putin isn't an idiot, no amount of propaganda is going to change the fact that some of what happens in Russia will never be accepted by the rest of the world. He just needs to look better than the alternative. It's far easier to make us look bad than himself look good.
cookiecaper 10y ago
Online marketing is completely dominated by this type of activity. I tried to market through legitimate means only (paid ads, word of mouth, fair, legitimately-earned reviews and press coverage). A competitor showed up and exceeded our 1 year+ head start in two months with spammy tactics, including fake social media reviews. It's impossible to win a competitive SEO game without a PBN for link manufacturing, a bunch of lackeys and bots posting on astroturfed accounts, and so forth. I learned that if I'm going to do another business that depends on traffic, there will be no option but to spam and turf aggressively. Google's dirty secret is that it's been completely and thoroughly gamed for a long time now. People are just used to sorting through the crap.
Steeeve 10y ago
You may as well have just reported that the sky is blue or that there is a lot of trash in the ocean. You haven't found a massive network of fake accounts. You found a script kiddy or two who didn't know enough to mask their activity or didn't care.
Balgair 10y ago
Semi-related aside, but fun: Every April Fool's Day I love to mess with family members. A (hypothetically) good effort:effect ratio I have found is Craigslist: Go into some large city's section (NYC, Austin, Sf, etc) and put up a listing for a 'free xbone' or a 'free PSS1', or something similarly typo'd. Explain that you are giving your kids' Xbone away because of a failing grade, you are moving overseas, your boyfriend cheated on you, etc. Then put down the number of the person to be pranked as the contact info. Now, here is the magic part: Specify that the callers for the free stuff must open the call with a Wookie sound, must text back in only haikus about salmon, must only refer to the xbox-one as a sausage, etc. It'll take the prank-ee a few hours to clear that mess up. This works wonders for April 1st day jokes, is fairly harmless, and generates a lot of fun stories. The thing I am trying to say to the dear NYT reporter, is that you don't necessarily need bots to do this work for you, and not really even money either, just the promise of something for the low price of the time it takes to make a phone call is usually enough. Greed, I guess, works for a very low commission.
- deleted 10y ago
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- zeroer 10y ago
  I understand it's all good-natured fun for you, but I'm glad I'm not in your family. You're making the world a worse place and wasting strangers' time.
  - Balgair 10y ago
    Chill, its only on April Fool's day, as I said.
- timthelion 10y ago
  I guess people downvote you because your hack is a social one and not a technical one :P
joezydeco 10y ago
Keep up the good fight, NY Times, and I hope you get a lot closer to the truth soon e.g.: http://freebeacon.com/politics/trumps-twitter-followed-millions-inactive-fake-accounts/ http://freebeacon.com/politics/trumps-twitter-followed-milli...
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abandonliberty 10y ago
I wonder if others share my interest in what legitimate businesses are doing. For example, Hootsuite Amplify is a platform designed to dominate social media by making it easy for your company's employee base to share and promote curated content. This has a similar effect to botnets, except it's not violating t&c. We're entering a world where authentic conversation is harder and harder to find. Historically personal content such as emails and tweets are now carefully constructed and managed, but still presented as personal content. https://hootsuite.com/products/amplify https://hootsuite.com/products/amplify
- CPLX 10y ago
  > We're entering a world where authentic conversation is harder and harder to find. I guess. When I was a youth you found authentic conversation by being in the world and meeting an authentic person and having a conversation. If we keep that definition constant then it's precisely as hard to find today as it has always been.
  - abandonliberty 10y ago
    I think you have a blind spot here. When you were a youth, being in the world and meeting an authentic person didn't have quite as much competition as it does today. It's like saying you're not concerned about the environmental impact of cars because we can always choose good old reliable walking instead.
- rapind 10y ago
  Everyone is a marketer now. Selling out has been glorified. Consuming this pseudo content is tiring though... Keep calm and shill on?
fsttx 10y ago
There's an angle that hasn't been explored that ought to be: a lot of news and political commentary websites used to run their own comment systems for articles or use pseudonymous services like Disqus, but these were overrun by "trolls" and spammers. Many then switched to Facebook, presumably hoping that the "Real Name" policy would improve things. The interesting thing is that clicking on many of the Facebook profiles on these comments leads to curiously sterile profiles, with a few friends. Some of the most vehemently pro-Trump comments seem to have originated from these accounts, especially on certain Conservative sites during the Republican Primary season. Facebook seems to have no interest (or ability) to clean this up.
- Inconel 10y ago
  I don't doubt that many of the commenters praising Trump, or any other politician for that matter, may in fact be sockpuppet accounts, but I wonder if this might be a similar situation to what we saw with polling prior to the election in which Trump voters were less willing to admit to voting for him. I'm not actually sure if this was the case but I've heard it theorized that this is one of the reasons polling might have been so off. Perhaps there are commenters unwilling to link their real FB identity to supporting Trump? On the other hand, I see plenty of people make outrageous statements online clearly linked to their real FB profile so maybe this isn't a widespread concern.
  - fsttx 10y ago
    I mentioned that this happened on Conservative sites, and it was during the Primaries. It seems unlikely that, under those circumstances, people would be so shy about expressing their preferences. Also these are not just stand-alone fake accounts with no friends created for making comments....these are curated to have enough details that make them look plausible to an unsophisticated automated detector (or overworked FB abuse department employee), but they have few friends, all with similar sorts of profiles, and no signs of activity except for posting comments. I do agree that there was an element of "shyness" and self-censorship, but I expect it was from supporters of other candidates, who would not want their Real Names and identities to get embroiled in fights with fake profiles.
luismmolina 10y ago
A few years ago, probably 3, it was very very easy to build your network of bots. Today is more difficult (those accounts don't last that long). I personally bought thousands and advertise my websites, you could get 10,000 visits per day in 1 day old sites. I can't imagine what you can do with money and a few people in your organization.
throwaway0100 10y ago
It's like the battle that newspapers have against ad blockers in people's browsers. Twitter has to balance usability here. People make fake accounts for everything everywhere for all sorts of reasons. Seems as though you stumbled on some fakes that may all be related (all posting starwars quotes) but maybe not. Could be just some off the shelf software that creates twitter accounts. Probably a non-negligible percent of people with the job description "social media manager" create small armies of bots to do their bidding. The first stop for any investigative journalist looking into this would have to be blackhatworld.com ... it has a really intimidating name but it's all just about marketing/spamming that violates terms of use. > "Their potential threats are real and scary due to the sheer size of the botnet," he said. Kind of overstates things. These accounts will likely be used for spam or advertising of some sort. Journalists have a distorted worldview when it comes to the importance of Twitter. I know you all love it, but the rest of the world doesn't really care.
- grzm 10y ago
  Speaking of accounts for various purposes, what's the reason you created this throwaway?
- dmoo 10y ago
  In my head I have started to call twitter shitpeoplesay. I find that it helps contextualize things when someone's tweets are reported in the news.
deleted 10y ago
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rmetzler 10y ago
I want to mention Reddit bots who copy user content to make karma and gain influence on Reddit. There is one kind that mostly copies images with karma in the 1.000s and repost them with the same title a year or two later. To appear more legit these bots also copy user comments and post them to /r/askreddit in threads that are similar named but most often not exactly the same as the original post. I suspect that often this /r/askreddit thread is also created by another bot from the same farm. I'm not sure what the owners do with these bots, but I suspect you could downvote views you don't like or upvote videos to the frontpage and make lots of views and money from that.
- fnord123 10y ago
  And bots that take twitter videos and post a streamable mirror? It seems similar enough that it would be on topic. How do they sit with you? As videos on twitter don't seem to work at all, it's a great service, imo.
  - rmetzler 10y ago
    There are "I'm here to provide a service" bots which are almost always named appropriately. Like a reddit bot that links to IMDB or Wikipedia or converts between metric and imperial units. The bots or sock puppets or fake accounts I mentioned don't provide any other value than copying old front-page material and repost it a year or 2 later without any indication that this isn't their own material.
- TylerE 10y ago
  Farm karma, then sell the accounts to political operatives, etc.
LordHumungous 10y ago
Just google "buy twitter followers"

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

startupdiscuss 10y ago

If 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 ago
There 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 ago
  https://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! :)
DanBC 10y ago
That's a really unsophisticated sockpuppet. For something more detailed I guess "Can we talk about nowheremom yet" is a good start: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/can-we-talk-about-nowheremom-yet.275172/ https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/can-we-talk-about-nowhe... http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http%3A//forums.anandtech.com/arcmessageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=102468 http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http%3A//forums.an... Or the "DaveonWheels" hoax: http://observer.com/2012/10/meet-hunter-dunn-the-young-man-whose-identity-was-stolen-for-the-dave-on-wheels-hoax/ http://observer.com/2012/10/meet-hunter-dunn-the-young-man-w... http://dave-on-wheels-exposed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dave-on-wheels-exposed-twist-you-never.html http://dave-on-wheels-exposed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dave-on...
jessewmc 10y ago
Tangent, but the Freudian id is usually rendered in all lowercase, and your meaning would be much clearer that way.

problems 10y ago

Anyone with $10 can go buy tens of thousands of followers. And they work. And stay for a fair while. I've done this a few times myself, it really doesn't take any more than a quick google search.

andai 10y ago
Would you mind sharing why you did it? I've been curious about this for a while.
- Spoom 10y ago
  One thing I can think of is getting support from the "social media" arm of companies; if they believe you're an "influencer", you're likely to get white glove treatment (and may otherwise be ignored).
- apocalyptic0n3 10y ago
  Not the OP, but I previously worked for a company that did this. We had tens of thousands of fake accounts on both Twitter and Facebook and had a script that would have them all (or specific sets) follow the same account at random points over the course of a few days (to avoid giving the client a few thousand followers instantly, which might draw attention). I can't remember full details since I wasn't involved, but I think we were charging $10 per 1,000 followers per network. The customers were generally people trying to get their small business out there or some local thinking it could make them into an internet celebrity (I work in/around Scottsdale, AZ and there are a lot of people here that think like that). We had a separate script that would check to make sure each account was still active once a day and if accounts were removed, they would be replenished automatically, although once a client lost a follower, it was gone and a new one didn't replace it for them. It was all kinda shady and it was one of the numerous reasons I left that web agency (which went bankrupt a year later and is no more), but it apparently produced decent results since search ranking increased both on Twitter/Facebook and on Google. I'm unsure if it is still as effective, though; this was almost 4 years ago that I left. Only time I've seen it first hand since was with a client trying to get famous. They made some YouTube videos and bought tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers from somewhere (we don't offer that at my current agency)

frozenport 10y ago

I would like to see more reporting on the poltical forces on Wikipedia.

aresant 10y ago

Could NYT quantify - through experimentation - the value of a bot army as the "story"? For instance a Tweet with 100 retweets is substantially more likely to generate additional retweets / be shown more by Twitter's algorithm / etc vs. a tweet with 10 retweets. And scale that up! Easy to build an experiment and quantify even on a small level for NYT.

stephengillie 10y ago
They could have tweeted, paid for a bot army to retweet, then reported on that.
- scholia 10y ago
  And then gotten criticized for being unethical....

avip 10y ago

Just approach the providers - they have nothing to hide, they are not involved in any illegal activity, and they'll be very happy to have their name dropped in NYT. "Buy social media followers" is a straightforward business.

facetube 10y ago
What sort of ethical framework permits this?
- inopinatus 10y ago
  Some ethical frameworks deal in prohibiting/limiting behaviours rather than granting permission. One could argue this is even preferable. Interestingly, as a line of inquiry, it leads to having philosophical difficulties with the Bill of Rights.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    So called "positive rights" and "negative rights[0]" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

_pecl 10y ago

I personally have thousands of Twitter accounts I control just for fun; I mostly use them for pranks, though in aggregate there are a few million followers between them (not sure how many duplicates there are, or, ironically, how many of their followers are bots). You can even buy software to create and manage Twitter accounts pretty easily in blackhat forums. For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for photos, auto-generated a bunch of bios using a few basic parameters, e.g. "Beer lover, proud parent." Names were easy - the most popular first & last names from census records, mix and match. Grab a few lat/longs and convert them to the biggest US cities and you have a location, find some data source to tweet from (breaking news is easiest) and you have a fully automated, human-like Twitter account. For bonus points, Pick a random color toward the low ends of the hexadecimal range ( rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f) works fine) and you even look like your page is personalized down to the color. Start following random people and 10% follow back (even more if you follow people who are tweeting about similar keywords as you - kindred spirits I guess). The only tricky part is making sure you don't cross lines with your IPs. You could buy/rent them privately, but you really only want to keep a few accounts (3-5) to each IP, so that gets expensive ($.75/IP/month) when you don't have a really good reason to use your accounts. You can scrape free listings for them, but those are nasty, slow, and can cause bans if Twitter decides to take down a whole range or if you are forced to switch IPs too quickly. Device type, browser, etc. is easy to spoof. Should you decide to, it's also really easy to change name, username, and profile picture of an account in the future. So if I wanted a few thousand Trump-supporting (or Trump-hating) sock puppets I could have them today. If you don't want to buy/create/manage Twitter accounts yourself you can get access to what's called a "panel." A panel is basically an automated, coin-operated network of fake accounts that you can control at wholesale prices. Want 5,000 followers? Plug $1/1,000 followers into the panel, supply the username, and you'll have them in a couple of minutes. Or resell 5,000 followers for $25 and pocket the $20 difference. For example of a panel, see this ad on blackhatworld: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel-youtube-facebook-instagram-twitter-and-more-90-services.835185/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel-yout.... Nothing special about this one, just the first I found when I googled. They're a dime a dozen. I'm certain there are millions of fake accounts for every service imaginable.

10y ago

sigmar 10y ago

These bots (and human run trolling accounts) have been widely reported on[1], but by many different organizations in different languages. Which seems to have made it not as widely known as it should be. I still see people arguing on twitter with what is clearly a bot. I would like to see someone write the story of the overarching result of what a world will look like in an increasing internet-focused world, when disinformation campaigns can be funded by the highest bidder, and actual individual voices get drained out. [1] Reports of Putin using online troll brigades pre-dates the creation of Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> when disinformation campaigns can be funded by the highest bidder, and actual individual voices get drained out. Isn't that the normal state of things since Gilgamesh?
- matt4077 10y ago
  Yeah. They told me the New York Times could be bought for $2.50, but all I got was a stack of paper.
d0mine 10y ago
Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia. Consider how it is compatible with the existence of Putin's troll army. At the very least try to imagine the relative scale of money/power involved in the propaganda in the West compared to the rest of the world. (for reference, check military spendings)
- tw04 10y ago
  >Try to remember the last time you heard anything positive about Russia. Why would you assume the troll army is trying to make "Russia" look good? It's far more likely they would focus on individual goals like keeping the US out of Ukraine. Or making us look bad on the international stage to other countries. They don't need to look good, they just need us to look bad. Putin isn't an idiot, no amount of propaganda is going to change the fact that some of what happens in Russia will never be accepted by the rest of the world. He just needs to look better than the alternative. It's far easier to make us look bad than himself look good.

cookiecaper 10y ago

Online marketing is completely dominated by this type of activity. I tried to market through legitimate means only (paid ads, word of mouth, fair, legitimately-earned reviews and press coverage). A competitor showed up and exceeded our 1 year+ head start in two months with spammy tactics, including fake social media reviews. It's impossible to win a competitive SEO game without a PBN for link manufacturing, a bunch of lackeys and bots posting on astroturfed accounts, and so forth. I learned that if I'm going to do another business that depends on traffic, there will be no option but to spam and turf aggressively. Google's dirty secret is that it's been completely and thoroughly gamed for a long time now. People are just used to sorting through the crap.

Steeeve 10y ago

You may as well have just reported that the sky is blue or that there is a lot of trash in the ocean. You haven't found a massive network of fake accounts. You found a script kiddy or two who didn't know enough to mask their activity or didn't care.

Balgair 10y ago

Semi-related aside, but fun: Every April Fool's Day I love to mess with family members. A (hypothetically) good effort:effect ratio I have found is Craigslist: Go into some large city's section (NYC, Austin, Sf, etc) and put up a listing for a 'free xbone' or a 'free PSS1', or something similarly typo'd. Explain that you are giving your kids' Xbone away because of a failing grade, you are moving overseas, your boyfriend cheated on you, etc. Then put down the number of the person to be pranked as the contact info. Now, here is the magic part: Specify that the callers for the free stuff must open the call with a Wookie sound, must text back in only haikus about salmon, must only refer to the xbox-one as a sausage, etc. It'll take the prank-ee a few hours to clear that mess up. This works wonders for April 1st day jokes, is fairly harmless, and generates a lot of fun stories. The thing I am trying to say to the dear NYT reporter, is that you don't necessarily need bots to do this work for you, and not really even money either, just the promise of something for the low price of the time it takes to make a phone call is usually enough. Greed, I guess, works for a very low commission.

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zeroer 10y ago
I understand it's all good-natured fun for you, but I'm glad I'm not in your family. You're making the world a worse place and wasting strangers' time.
- Balgair 10y ago
  Chill, its only on April Fool's day, as I said.
timthelion 10y ago
I guess people downvote you because your hack is a social one and not a technical one :P

joezydeco 10y ago

Keep up the good fight, NY Times, and I hope you get a lot closer to the truth soon e.g.: http://freebeacon.com/politics/trumps-twitter-followed-millions-inactive-fake-accounts/ http://freebeacon.com/politics/trumps-twitter-followed-milli...

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abandonliberty 10y ago

I wonder if others share my interest in what legitimate businesses are doing. For example, Hootsuite Amplify is a platform designed to dominate social media by making it easy for your company's employee base to share and promote curated content. This has a similar effect to botnets, except it's not violating t&c. We're entering a world where authentic conversation is harder and harder to find. Historically personal content such as emails and tweets are now carefully constructed and managed, but still presented as personal content. https://hootsuite.com/products/amplify https://hootsuite.com/products/amplify

CPLX 10y ago
> We're entering a world where authentic conversation is harder and harder to find. I guess. When I was a youth you found authentic conversation by being in the world and meeting an authentic person and having a conversation. If we keep that definition constant then it's precisely as hard to find today as it has always been.
- abandonliberty 10y ago
  I think you have a blind spot here. When you were a youth, being in the world and meeting an authentic person didn't have quite as much competition as it does today. It's like saying you're not concerned about the environmental impact of cars because we can always choose good old reliable walking instead.
rapind 10y ago
Everyone is a marketer now. Selling out has been glorified. Consuming this pseudo content is tiring though... Keep calm and shill on?

fsttx 10y ago

There's an angle that hasn't been explored that ought to be: a lot of news and political commentary websites used to run their own comment systems for articles or use pseudonymous services like Disqus, but these were overrun by "trolls" and spammers. Many then switched to Facebook, presumably hoping that the "Real Name" policy would improve things. The interesting thing is that clicking on many of the Facebook profiles on these comments leads to curiously sterile profiles, with a few friends. Some of the most vehemently pro-Trump comments seem to have originated from these accounts, especially on certain Conservative sites during the Republican Primary season. Facebook seems to have no interest (or ability) to clean this up.

Inconel 10y ago
I don't doubt that many of the commenters praising Trump, or any other politician for that matter, may in fact be sockpuppet accounts, but I wonder if this might be a similar situation to what we saw with polling prior to the election in which Trump voters were less willing to admit to voting for him. I'm not actually sure if this was the case but I've heard it theorized that this is one of the reasons polling might have been so off. Perhaps there are commenters unwilling to link their real FB identity to supporting Trump? On the other hand, I see plenty of people make outrageous statements online clearly linked to their real FB profile so maybe this isn't a widespread concern.
- fsttx 10y ago
  I mentioned that this happened on Conservative sites, and it was during the Primaries. It seems unlikely that, under those circumstances, people would be so shy about expressing their preferences. Also these are not just stand-alone fake accounts with no friends created for making comments....these are curated to have enough details that make them look plausible to an unsophisticated automated detector (or overworked FB abuse department employee), but they have few friends, all with similar sorts of profiles, and no signs of activity except for posting comments. I do agree that there was an element of "shyness" and self-censorship, but I expect it was from supporters of other candidates, who would not want their Real Names and identities to get embroiled in fights with fake profiles.

luismmolina 10y ago

A few years ago, probably 3, it was very very easy to build your network of bots. Today is more difficult (those accounts don't last that long). I personally bought thousands and advertise my websites, you could get 10,000 visits per day in 1 day old sites. I can't imagine what you can do with money and a few people in your organization.

throwaway0100 10y ago

It's like the battle that newspapers have against ad blockers in people's browsers. Twitter has to balance usability here. People make fake accounts for everything everywhere for all sorts of reasons. Seems as though you stumbled on some fakes that may all be related (all posting starwars quotes) but maybe not. Could be just some off the shelf software that creates twitter accounts. Probably a non-negligible percent of people with the job description "social media manager" create small armies of bots to do their bidding. The first stop for any investigative journalist looking into this would have to be blackhatworld.com ... it has a really intimidating name but it's all just about marketing/spamming that violates terms of use. > "Their potential threats are real and scary due to the sheer size of the botnet," he said. Kind of overstates things. These accounts will likely be used for spam or advertising of some sort. Journalists have a distorted worldview when it comes to the importance of Twitter. I know you all love it, but the rest of the world doesn't really care.

grzm 10y ago
Speaking of accounts for various purposes, what's the reason you created this throwaway?
dmoo 10y ago
In my head I have started to call twitter shitpeoplesay. I find that it helps contextualize things when someone's tweets are reported in the news.

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rmetzler 10y ago

I want to mention Reddit bots who copy user content to make karma and gain influence on Reddit. There is one kind that mostly copies images with karma in the 1.000s and repost them with the same title a year or two later. To appear more legit these bots also copy user comments and post them to /r/askreddit in threads that are similar named but most often not exactly the same as the original post. I suspect that often this /r/askreddit thread is also created by another bot from the same farm. I'm not sure what the owners do with these bots, but I suspect you could downvote views you don't like or upvote videos to the frontpage and make lots of views and money from that.

fnord123 10y ago
And bots that take twitter videos and post a streamable mirror? It seems similar enough that it would be on topic. How do they sit with you? As videos on twitter don't seem to work at all, it's a great service, imo.
- rmetzler 10y ago
  There are "I'm here to provide a service" bots which are almost always named appropriately. Like a reddit bot that links to IMDB or Wikipedia or converts between metric and imperial units. The bots or sock puppets or fake accounts I mentioned don't provide any other value than copying old front-page material and repost it a year or 2 later without any indication that this isn't their own material.
TylerE 10y ago
Farm karma, then sell the accounts to political operatives, etc.

LordHumungous 10y ago

Just google "buy twitter followers"