11 ms·
Up to 48M Twitter accounts may be bots
- Oatary 10y agoDoes it really surprise anyone?
- have_faith 10y agoBetter title: "Up to 48 Twitter accounts may be human" Snark aside, there is no way around this. Followers in digital public spaces are representative of social status, the demand for appearing popular will never go away and so neither will the bots.
- m1sta_ 10y agoConfirmed identity with the service would resolve this.
- ticviking 10y agoAnd result in a rich trove of rich identities to be stolen.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoThis isn't necessarily true. If world governments could use their records to create an OAuth-like service, you could uniquely verify citizenship without giving away personally identifying information
- TheRealDunkirk 10y agoShall I go ahead and start the over/under pool on how long it would take before it was hacked? I think it's a compelling idea, but it would probably be the most-interesting target in the world.
- doctorless 10y agoI think a singular, required identity service on the Internet is one of the greatest threats to free speech.
- chillwaves 10y agohow about a voluntary one? Let people be authenticated and let people see how many followers are authenticated or not.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoDepends on how it's implemented. As always, the devil's in the details. If it were properly sandboxed, it seems it shouldn't require anything more than the government's unique ID eg a Social Security Number as a backing for tokens granted. In that regard it wouldn't be any more juicy than any other common store of SSNs, of which there are sadly quite a few. You would presumably be able to use this information to de-anonymize previously created tokens, but that would require you to gain access to the token as used, which would also require a breach of Twitter or whoever else. It's not unthinkable, but if Twitter is breached you might have enough info to de-anonymize its users anyway.
- Implicated 10y agoRight, and even after years of this, they've chosen not to do that. Nor require even a confirmed email address. Twitter is arguably built to be a spam platform. Streaming API? oh man...
- gozur88 10y agoI'd ask for my money back if I'd been marketing on Twitter.
- jasode 10y agoTo compare, I looked up the estimates[1][2] on Facebook and if we use 170 million out of 1.4 billion, that's ~11.7%. That is in the ballpark of Twitter's 15% (48m/319m). I guess if you make a popular service that doesn't require a credit-card payment or phone SMS text as a test for human verification, you should expect >10% of fake accounts even with state-of-the-art heuristics detection. [1] not sure why Huffington Post is top google link about it but the other news sites say the same 170M: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-parsons/facebooks-war-continues-against-fake-profiles-and-bots_b_6914282.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-parsons/facebooks-war-co... [2] 2015 1Q user count: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- blackice 10y agoYou can look for proxy / hosting IPs. These bots are most likely running on servers.
- ben_jones 10y agoSo wouldn't it be relatively simple to block AWS/Azure/etc ip blocks AND duplicate accounts from single addresses? Wouldn't that be a large drop in bots right there? Corollary: I once played a large MMO that intentionally inflated user numbers right before they were acquired via content updates that encouraged the creation of multiple bots per actual player. I'm sure at some level executives are aware that bots are good for business and allow them to persist.
- Zenst 10y agoCame across one the other day, just by mentioning in a post "blue plaque", got instant like and retweet. This started me thinking of a little game - what post with the limitations of 140 characters could you post that would trigger the attention of the most bots for automatic retweets/likes? It's on my to do list, when bored, but I'd imagine others have had comparable thoughts and may of already had a go. Anybody got any other examples?
- caseysoftware 10y agoMention Beiber and you'll get a swarm of likes, Rts, and responses. It used to be a personal game for me to get a friend to mention him and watch the swarm. It used to kill the usefulness of your notifications for at least a day. ;)
- brndnmtthws 10y agoI don't think it works https://twitter.com/brndnmtthws/status/840680198102228993 https://twitter.com/brndnmtthws/status/840680198102228993
- tradersam 10y agoWhy, just why, did you add the kissing emoji?
- brndnmtthws 10y agoThat's the most important part
- qbrass 10y agoTechnically, the post said to mention Beiber, not Bieber.
- brndnmtthws 10y agoYikes, I messed up.
- paulgrimes1 10y agoOf the 48M, somehow 31.6M of them are inexplicably One Direction fans
- Dim25 10y agoHeh, personally, it feels like 80% of twitter are various "Social Media Automation Tools" following and retweeting each other.
- RussianCow 10y agoThis reminds me of the Onion Talks episode, "Using Social Media To Cover For Lack Of Original Thought"[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY
- LastZactionHero 10y agoI once wrote an automated tool that got in a loop with someone else's automated tool. Bot love.
- patgenzler 10y agoThis is a result of what I call "audience economy". People want an audience and are willing to pay for it. Audience likes to see a prior audience. Bots enable prior audiences. Platforms like fiverr enable bots. Get 5000 twitter followers for $5 Those 5000 fake followers make you look good to people that come across you, and they flow. So it's all about an initial audience.
- pierrepoutine 10y agoIt feels very discouraging to start out in this space once a given platform reaches a certain level of maturity. For instance, Insta now seems littered with these local service/small-business accounts spamming the most optimised hashtags with inspirational quotes on stock photographs; most engagement seems to come from bots and scripts being used by these same accounts. (Maybe I'm playing the game wrong.) Does buying 5k followers really help in any way? Won't the more sophisticated users (ideally those whom you'd be targeting as followers) see through this based on your engagement rates, or does having a certain number of followers hold some weight with the algos which leads to your stuff attracting more engagement, followers, etc. in some kind of virtuous cycle?
- patgenzler 10y agoUnfortunately no. When a social platform becomes "big" as in, reaches early majority, spam finds a way in. No algorithm can stop it. Quantity kills quality. The "sophisticated" early adopters lose it. Look around. People will do whatever it takes to get to "front page", "top stories", and such. Medium obsesses about quality, but their top stories, fueled by recommendations from "the common man", are full of junk. Same with LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.
- owenmarshall 10y ago> HackerNews is saved simply because it's small. lol
- jsemrau 10y ago
- jsemrau 10y agoAnd one of them is mine. It recommends an event once you tweet to her. It is actually a service that many people appreciate. So in summary, bot != bad.
- hacker_9 10y agoThis won't suprised anyone that uses twitter. In fact I rely on 2-3 bots to retweet my tweets and so get more coverage. They have a place, it's not all bad.
- mcculley 10y agoThe article said that.
- makecheck 10y agoWhile automatic control of computerized interfaces should surprise no one, “bot”-like behavior is not limited to computers and isn’t new. One should always be skeptical even when something comes from humans: for instance, a “customer review” could be a paid reviewer, or someone talking on the nightly news could be essentially controlled by the puppet strings of their organization and not really voicing their own position. Ideally no one ever puts too much faith in what they hear from a handful of people because that is not statistically significant (there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. alone, billions in the world; sample sizes must be gigantic). Where “millions” of accounts become dangerous is when trying to determine if even a “statistically significant sample size” is legitimate. I seriously doubt that most organizations ever come close to finding a large enough sample in the first place before reporting a finding. And yet, if they primarily look at online postings instead of actually talking to people, it’s likely that even a large sample is totally messed up. That should concern everyone.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- WillyOnWheels 10y agoThe USC researchers own research says there's a 57 percent chance @realdonaldtrump is a bot http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump
- chrismealy 10y agoHave you read it? It sounds the like output of a Markov chain text generator. Sad!
- doctorless 10y agoThere's a method to that madness. Whether he is actually aware of it or not (I lean more towards the former), that stream-of-consciousness styled rhetoric is incredibly magnetizing to a large percentage of people. In my research on AI-driven political engagement, I found that while intensively complex generated argumentation can engage relatively sharper audiences without arousing suspicion, it is more computationally expensive, and those people do not have as much flex in opinion. The use of simpler, "like output of a Markov chain text generator" styled tools help separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of pliability.
- tomcam 10y agoI see what you did there
- edibleEnergy 10y agoThere's really no legitimate reason why twitter allows follows via their API[1]. I'm not sure if they see some benefit from allowing spam-follow bots to run wild or what they could possibly be thinking. [1]: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/create https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/crea...
- nperez 10y agoThere's also no reason to believe that botting is done via API in most cases. I would think it's easier to detect + ban that way. I don't know how it's done in the majority of cases, but I know it's not particularly difficult to write a bot that drives an actual browser and emulates human mouse behavior.
- Kexoth 10y agoI'm thinking that this is not as `black&white` as said. There are accounts which actually are used by people/companies, they post authentic content but do some automated actions. E.g. a company account which tweets authentic content for their field but on the other hand has automated retweets on certain hashtags in order to gain their authors as followers or to come up as related to other accounts in same field. Also to mention that there are services such as IFTTT which actually can help you to automate such actions and make bot-like behavior. I guess the same would apply to Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nthcolumn 10y agoThere is a recent trend in anti-Twitter chatter. I seem to remember msn-bots being all the rage once upon a time.