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Twitter Is Crawling with Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expel Them
- dmix 9y agoOnly 1600 bots? This sounds like the makings of a moral panic to me. There's a lot of misunderstanding about what these bots are capable of... and I keep seeing top ranking comments on Reddit talking about these bots daily. The media seems to be spreading the idea they are autonomous agents automatically posting content on politically useful threads, with bot voting rings pumping them up. When in reality they still rely heavily on a human-intensive process, requiring lots of manual targeting and copywriting, and Reddit/Twitter/etc are very good at detecting voting-rings, having been perfecting algorithms to detect them for over a decade. And do people think Russia or fringe right-wing groups have some super-effective autonomous bots that weren't also available to the best paid US consultants? If these fake Twitter accounts, usually bots only followed by other bots, were understood in terms of the hundreds of millions of real users on Twitter, the billions spent by both real parties, and within the context of the technical limitations of bots, it wouldn't seem so scary.
- Triesault 9y agoThat was one researcher for one specific topic, anti-Macron sentiment. > A researcher finds 1,600 bots tweeting extremist posts in U.S. elections also spread anti-Macron sentiment in France A second quote from the article shows a much larger bot population. > Research from the University of Southern California and Indiana University shows that 9 to 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots.
- deadmetheny 9y agoThe real question is how many of those bots are spambots and bots attempting to pose as real people, as opposed to bots that are open about the fact that they are bots? There's plenty of top-shelf novelty accounts on Twitter that are also bots.
- dmix 9y agoNot to mention, a single person creating thousands of bot accounts is easy, you need those thousand other bots so your one primary bot has enough followers/likes. But in the press that will be counted as 1000s instead of 1. Not to mention getting those bots to get a meaningful audience is very challenging. I have plenty of fake 'bot' followers, and 99.9% of their followers are other bot. It's largely a bunch of bots tweeting to other bots. The main risk is hashtags being gamed and people buying voting rings/followers... which has been a problem on the internet forever.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThe open bots have an incentive to make one bot for each usecase, one person trying to make spam bots has an incentive to create as many bots as possible. I have no numbers on the subject, but I would be shocked if it were anywhere close to fifty percent.
- deadmetheny 9y agoFrankly, I'd expect the percentage to be significantly less than 50%. Determining good from bad bots without a manual check is an interesting problem, though, and it's not cool on Twitter's part if they ban legit bots that people find useful/entertaining on top of the bad actors.
- notahacker 9y agoThat's one reason why a no bot policy wouldn't work. A bot posting articles from your favourite news site is actually useful. A bot which prints out Trump's tweets, burns them and then tweets out the video [@burnedyourtweet] is mildly amusing (and some pretty smart engineering). A bot which automatically replies to every tweet by $personality with a meme is usually an 'orrible troll, but occasionally amusing and often owned by someone who's very convinced the First Amendment applies to Twitter. A retweet bot which does a plausible impression of an angry Trumper might be indistinguishable from the real thing without investigating its network, and I don't think eliminating the real thing would be a great move for Twitter to make. The other reason is that Twitter's review process is more or less completely random in its responses (I'm reminded of the girl that reported literally the same abusive tweet directed at her from three troll accounts, and received a different response for each one)
- AaronFriel 9y agoThere were about 400,000 bots posting political messages during the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Twitter, according to a research paper by Emilio Ferrara, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California.
- dmix 9y agoThe next line which you left out: > He told Bloomberg that he has discovered that the same group of 1,600 bots tweeting extremist right-wing posts in the U.S. elections also posted anti-Macron sentiment during the French elections and extremist right-wing content during the German elections this year. So of those 400k political bots, 1600 were identified as talking about fringe topics. Not to mention it's not clear how this fits into the bigger picture? What percentage of ALL of Twitter accounts are bots? How many of those bots are active? How many actually have an audience of real people, not just other bots? For ex: 400k fake accounts, with few real followers, out of hundreds of millions of real users talking politics may not seem as significant... Not saying it's not a 'problem', but it needs to be understood in context, especially considering the constant news coverage and outrage.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago>So of those 400k political bots, 1600 were identified as talking about fringe topics. Read it again. Of those 400k bots, 1600 were identified talking about the US elections, anti-Macron sentiment, and extremist far-right topics. All three topics. That could be one person/group reusing bots. Additionally, hundreds of millions of real users talking politics is unlikely. Twitter has 300 milliom active users per month, 9-15% of them bots, the US election had 120 million voters. Hundreds of millions would be nearly everyone.
- dmix 9y ago> Twitter has 300 milliom active users per month, 9-15% of them bots, the US election had 120 million voters Fair enough. So if 10% of voters used Twitter, that means 3% (400k) were bots, and of those a tiny percent were fringe/far-right.
- PhisherPrice 9y agoIt's a shame that hostile foreign governments can do this to us without a strong retaliation. We should be doing the same to their social media platforms, such as VK and OK, but it appears that we are not. Though we are more than capable of equal retaliation.
- dogruck 9y agoI disagree with your statement that "we should be doing the same." That said, I think it's possible that we actually are doing the same thing.
- porfirium 9y agoWhat do you think the CIA does?
- rtx 9y agoHack routers.
- skinnymuch 9y agoNot saying "retaliation" makes any sense, but do you not think the CIA, NSA, DIA, et al do their own share of "mischief"?
- CharlesW 9y ago> I read into the investigations on FB/Twitter and they only found 10k-100k ads/posts bought by Russians on each platform. Those numbers aren't ads/posts, they're dollars. In September, Facebook confirmed that Russian operatives spent $100,000 on psyops advertising. Keep in mind that (1) $100,000 is 15-25 million impressions reaching millions of highly-targeted people (Cambridge Analytica is now under investigation by the HPSCI), all amplified by the targets' engagement, and that (2) FB is sharing only 100% confirmed activity discovered during very early, self-investigated findings.
- rtx 9y agoWhat do you mean by highly targeted? People who can't think for themselves.
- nkg 9y agoThis! this is the perfect target!
- zaroth 9y agoKeep in mind - total spent on the 2016 election according to CBS was $6.8 Billion [1]. In that context, how could $100,000 of FB ads (0.001%) possibly be relevant? Speculating that it might possibly be relevant if we hypothetically were to discover it was 100x bigger than we currently know, to me that defeats the whole argument. "Big if true!" is the rallying cry of the whole Russiagate fiasco. "Big if Bigger!" is just the next contortion. [1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-billion/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-bi...
- bradleyankrom 9y agoNot sure I agree that Twitter doesn't have incentive to get rid of the bots. Bots are bad for user experience and contribute to noise that affects the quality of inputs used by journalists, marketing types, etc. to evaluate trends. The article references the number of active users as a critical piece of Twitter's valuation, but Wall Street can't be dumb enough to completely ignore the quality of those users.
- delecti 9y agoThe question is whether bots are bad enough for the user experience to make people leave.
- bradleyankrom 9y agoAnecdotal, but I left in some part because of the noise created by bots.
- blackflame7000 9y agoI left because there weren't enough bots to bring the average tweet quality up to marginally awful status.
- empath75 9y agoIf they were serious about getting rid of bots, they'd have to stop lying about the real size of their user base.
- dogruck 9y agoI suspect we could brainstorm a long list of things that Twitter should be doing, but isn't. Since I've never personally tried to solve any of the problems on that imaginary list, it's tough for me to discern between: 1. It's hard 2. It's possible, but has bad side-effects (like censorship) 3. No incentive (ultimately will not help their stock price)
- emilsedgh 9y agoEvery time I try to use Twitter, it feels like they actively try to sell all the noise as signal.
- nextstep 9y agoThere are tons of fake accounts on Twitter. It doesn't take much to get hundreds or even thousands to engage with you (follow you, reply to your tweets with a common hashtag, etc.). I thought a year or two ago that Twitter was avoiding cleaning house and removing the obviously fake accounts because they were simultaneously trying to show growth on the platform and if anything removing these bots would hurt their growth metrics.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoInsstagram is in exactly the same boat. Although they technically ban botting, and make cursory efforts to stop it, it's not really stopped. Here's a good article on Insta botting, which goes info further detail: https://petapixel.com/2017/04/06/spent-two-years-botting-instagram-heres-learned/ https://petapixel.com/2017/04/06/spent-two-years-botting-ins...
- sigmar 9y agoHow about the SEC opens an investigation into whether Twitter is defrauding investors/advertisers by including bot accounts in user metrics? Or is that too hard to prove?
- bradleyankrom 9y agoI think the bigger challenge would be convincing the SEC that including the bots in their user metrics constitutes fraud.
- QAPereo 9y agoThe bots count towards ad revenue, so add prior knowledge by Twitter, and boom... fraud.
- bradleyankrom 9y agoYeah, but they are still real accounts that exist. AFAIK, whether they're operated by humans or machines isn't a consideration when reporting user numbers.
- BoiledCabbage 9y agoBut your comment almost says it: Whether or not they're actual users isn't a consideration when reporting user numbers. Are they reporting user numbers or account #s? Is it ok if they generate 1billion accoints themselves? Why/why not? What's different? Impressions are based on "eyeballs" on ads. Machines look at ads. Customers can project ad blocker %.
- bradleyankrom 9y agoIntent to defraud would be clear if they generated a billion new, fake accounts.
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
- mv4 9y agoThis problem is much bigger than any of these articles seem to imply. I am also convinced that Twitter knew this all along. Unfortunately, bots don't just inflate user numbers for them, they create ad revenue. Additionally, the majority of self-proclaimed "influencers" rely almost entirely on automation for publishing (i.e. they are not really "there" on the platform), and bots for amplification. If you dig deeper, there's a number of "certified" Twitter partners there, that provide social media analytics and management platforms. They pay Twitter for data access, but they employ 3rd parties to provide "amplification" for them, via bot farms - creating the illusion of effectiveness for the subscriber. The rate of real, authentic human discovery and engagement on Twitter right now is incredibly low.
- mschuster91 9y ago> Unfortunately, bots don't just inflate user numbers for them, they create ad revenue. How? At the end of the day, a human sees the ad and so generates ad revenue for Twitter. A bot a) does not see the ad tweets in his normal timeline feed and b) does not feed back impression tracking to Twitter.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> A bot a) does not see the ad tweets in his normal timeline feed and b) does not feed back impression tracking to Twitter Source?
- mschuster91 9y agoI have written both bots and a client, I have yet to see a sponsored tweet. In fact this is why Twitter cracked down on 3rd party clients because they cannot show sponsored tweets.
- shostack 9y agoIf the bots are posting content or attracting real human eyeballs with their comments, would they not be able to generate revenue then?
- seizethecheese 9y agoThe problem isn't that they lack incentives, it's that by expelling bots they'll inevitably expel some real users. The cure isn't worth the side effects.
- komali2 9y agoIf gmail can spam filter emails, why can't Twitter do the same for bots?
- porfirium 9y agoGmail gets a big amount of metadata with each mail which they run lots of checks against.
- BoiledCabbage 9y agoHow do we know if they won't report the extent of the disease? And we're not even confident they know the extent. If they don't know the extent, they couldn't have made an informed judgement.
- jpttsn 9y agoSo you’re saying that instead of trying to rescue their stock price, Twitter are looking to treat everyone fairly, cost no object?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stale2002 9y agoWell apparently so, as they are choosing not to do so. Or maybe it isn't costing them much money.
- jpttsn 9y agoNo, I think the difference gp ignores is that they could either protect false negative real users, and eat a loss for the good of those, vs. ignore real users getting squeezed and boost stock price by...? This is where it gets fuzzy.
- dboreham 9y agoTuring Test passed! That was easy.
- WhiteNoiz3 9y agoIf twitter doesn't ban bots, at least give them an official designation and require people to be honest about whether the account is bot controlled or not. Advertisers want to reach people not bots. If they got together and demanded more accurate reporting then there would be a financial incentive.
- ntheuon32tnoe 9y agoIf they did that, then wouldn't normal people just claim that their accounts were bots, and then they wouldn't be served ads anymore?
- WhiteNoiz3 9y agoGood point. Sounds like there needs to be a bot tax. ;)
- discodave 9y agoTwitter could differentiate between access through official clients and APIs.
- llccbb 9y agoTwitter is also crawling with fun and light-hearted bots that are non-manipulative and generate content for others to consume. I would hate to see any of those bots get thrown off the platform.
- jayroh 9y agoSpitballin' here but, if Twitter allowed for "registering" a bot, then these sorts of fun and light-hearted bots could easily stick around. If someone has a legit reason to fear registering a bot they run, then it's probably for "not-good" reasons. And in my estimation "not-good" could be as innocuous as those follower-fishing bots.
- eric_h 9y agoMost bots that I've encountered on twitter "register" a bot by saying it's a bot in the profile. The "up-to-no-good" bots do no such thing, of course.
- komali2 9y agoIt's so frustrating because I'm trying to genuinely engage people with the opposing opinion on Twitter, and sometimes I have real discussions, but easily 50% of the time I realize I'm dealing with a bot. Or a troll. I can't really tell the difference anymore.
- Animats 9y agoTwitter needs a "real name" policy, like Facebook.
- brink 9y agoctags are practically dead on twitter. Good luck searching for something like $LTC or $PTOY without crawling through pages of ctag spam with russian names linking to telegram accounts. It really shouldn't be that hard to fix.
- codedokode 9y agoThose bots are used inside Russia too, for example, they like and repost pro-government tweets and add agressive comments to tweets from opposition politians to make it look like common people don't like them. They reply to the tweets so there is a real human behind the account. They are not a computer program. But of course Twitter has no obligation to ban them. If anyone is interested, here is an example of probably bot account [1]. It was registered in Nov 2013 and has posted 27 000 tweets and retweets which is 18.5 tweets per day on average. Another account [2] has a random user id and has posted 2000 tweets in last 3 months. And by the way I don't think that bots influenced election results. I watched the debates and Hillary's position was very weak. [1] https://twitter.com/alexflex777 https://twitter.com/alexflex777 [2] https://twitter.com/cHprdSiZ8MQONMl https://twitter.com/cHprdSiZ8MQONMl
- calvinbhai 9y agoHow about these bots? @newsyc250 @newsyc100 @newsyc50 @newsyc20 Why should these bot accounts be expelled? I just love the way some bot accounts are so useful. In fact, following the above mentioned bot accounts, gives you just enough number of Hacker News posts that you want to see, based on how popular they are. Similarly, there can be many bad bot accounts, but differentiating those from good bot accounts may not be an easy task, and bound to fail with false negatives and false positives.
- codedokode 9y agoThe article says not about bots generally but about the bots that (allegedly) were controlled by Russia and (allegedly) were posting pro-Trump tweets and (allegedly) could help him to win the elections. But from a legal point of view, is Twitter obliged to find and ban such bots? I don't think so. Marking them as bots would be a good idea though.
- sli 9y ago> Marking them as bots would be a good idea though. I agree. I like how Telegram does bots. They have first class support for bots, and the separation between real user and bot is extremely clear. You have to specifically create a bot account, and bots have certain restrictions that users don't have (e.g. they cannot initiate a conversation themselves). Of course, that assumes the bot is set up as intended. One could masquerade a bot as a real user if they were clever enough and had a spare phone number, presumably. I've not tried it, but I'm going to assume it's possible, since you can very well write your own Telegram client.
- calvinbhai 9y agoTrue. I’d like bot accounts to be marked as such. It’s annoyingly to see bot accounts as real accounts, folllowing 5k or 10k + accounts following or liking my tweet because of a specific keyword. If twitter can fix that, it’ll be awesome.
- mixedbit 9y agoOnce our tweet used a popular hash tag and got re-tweeted by some bot network. It was really easy to tell the accounts were all bots, all the re-tweets happened simultaneously, profiles were very similar, with similar messy streams. I went into trouble of reporting each of the fake accounts manually (the UI for this is far from convenient). After some time I checked the bot accounts again. None of them was deleted, our original tweet still had a large re-tweets count, which basically misleads the real Tweeter users, making the tweet look more interesting that it really was. From this incident I no longer look at re-tweets as any reliable metric of popularity or quality of tweeted content.
- dawnerd 9y agoFlip side, it's realllly easy to tell when businesses hire botnets to push up their follower count in hopes of being verified. If an account has tens-hundreds of thousands of followers and no interactions from them, save to assume its all faked. Whats sad is twitter seems to verify them without actually looking.
- enzanki_ars 9y agoBut how can you tell if the bots are actually hired by the company? What if it was someone outside the company trying to influence Twitter for their own purposes?
- mattbeckman 9y agoWell, botnets and incentivized users are hard to tell apart. Incentivized users often appear to be bots, as their sole purpose for using Twitter is to get something from companies that want the numbers, and they often don't even bother setting a profile photo, or doing anything but retweet promotions.
- ProAm 9y agoSo is Facebook, so is Reddit, so it Instagram..... rinse and repeat.
- shostack 9y agoHow about incentive to expel users who violate their ToS like our President? Surely threatening nuclear war violates their "Abusive Behavior" rules (which are part of their TOS)... [1] > "Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism." And that's just getting started. Has there been ANY statement from Twitter leadership on why they permit Trump to continue with this behavior? I have my own cynical answer, but I'm curious if they've gone on record for what is such a blatant abuse of their ToS it is unconscionable that they let it continue. [1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311 https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311
- firloop 9y agoTwitter did respond to this recently. Apparently "newsworthiness" plays a factor in their decision making. https://twitter.com/Policy/status/912438362010783744 https://twitter.com/Policy/status/912438362010783744
- abootstrapper 9y agoThat's such a copout. Any threat of large scale violence from anyone could be considered "newsworthy." The real answer is they never anticipated a POTUS would break their TOS, and they have no idea how to deal with it, without being hypocritical.
- bcherny 9y agoTo be fair, he's their biggest user. http://huffingtonpost.ca/2017/08/18/donald-trump-worth-2-billion-to-twitter-analyst_a_23151685/ http://huffingtonpost.ca/2017/08/18/donald-trump-worth-2-bil...
- MBCook 9y agoThey have. Basicaly... too bad. He gets us users. At least that’s my interpretation. https://www.avclub.com/twitter-releases-statement-confirming-itll-never-ban-do-1818766712 https://www.avclub.com/twitter-releases-statement-confirming...
- JonFish85 9y ago
- tunesmith 9y agoI was thinking the other day about how bots effectively hack the first amendment. If you're one to believe that the proper remedy for offensive speech is more speech, the bots kind of throw that out the window. Trolls are at least actual people, but bots are not. You're not going to exchange views with a bot. So it's reasonable to suppress bot content. But then the problem is, how do you know it's a bot? What's the foolproof algorithm that determines whether someone is or isn't a bot, without false positives or false negatives? What if it's someone that is merely scheduling their own tweet? So it means you've opened the door to suppressing someone's speech based on the content of their message.
- pingpongchef 9y agoThere's a line we can draw and should draw. A scheduled tweet is a nice feature but it's acceptable to call a bot tweet. It's not the content of the message we want to stop, it's the sender
- indubitable 9y agoThis problem cannot be solved. As natural language processing and output become ever more sophisticated, it will in the very near future start to become impossible to discern between bot and human. Consequently, I think instead of trying to solve the issue of bots, it's more important to start educating people that just because they read something on the internet does not mean it's true. And just because lots of people seem to support an idea (or condemn an idea) says nothing about the actual public view towards said idea. This sounds somewhat patronizing (the first part in particular), but falling victim to confirmation bias is something we all do. When ideas fit our own personal biases, we tend to become much less critical of them. For instance animal testing, when visible, is something very few people can emotionally accept. And there have been countless hoaxes [1] where people will share an image of an animal in one context (such as a rabbit suffering from severe hair less / skin damage at a veterinarian) and then claim it's an image of the result of a named shampoo company testing their products on animals. It gets people riled up and interested in stopping animal testing, but the problem is that it's completely fake. This is an obvious example but the exact same is true of words themselves and it spreads into everything -- most notably politics. It's in many ways bizarre that we don't deal with this issue as a part of basic education. Imagery or messages designed to spark an emotional response are very effective against people who are not aware of what's happening. At the same time, they can be rendered far less potent by simply educating people about these tools of manipulation and giving them a wide swath of examples. In today's ever more connected world, with ever more people looking to shall we say 'utilize' other people, the complete neglect of this social skill in education today is perplexing. [1] - https://speakingofresearch.com/2017/05/16/context-matters-how-a-veterinary-image-became-cruel-animal-testing/ https://speakingofresearch.com/2017/05/16/context-matters-ho...
- jackmott 9y ago>This problem cannot be solved. identify verification when you create your account. charge a small fee when you create your account. >Consequently, I think instead of trying to solve the issue of bots, it's more important to start educating people that just because they read something on the internet does not mean it's true now THERE is a problem that cannot be solved!
- 9y ago
- DoodleBuggy 9y agoOn the contrary, it would appear that Twitter is incentivized to encourage bots and trolls to flourish. The definition of a bot could be problematic though. If a bot is merely automated posting, then virtually every company, news org, website, and anything else that uses automated posts is a "bot", and are those bad? I don't think so, those are useful. The problematic bots are basically automated trolls. Troll bots increase "engagement" metrics by quite a bit, this is obvious to any person if you look at the automated bot replies to virtually any post from a news agency or anyone with a large twitter following. They also jump onto every hash tag or breaking news event spreading garbage. You'll find dozens of bots making absurd statements followed by bots responding to those bots, and clueless people arguing with the bots. Combine that with the endless seas of human trolls that also jump into everything, and those interactions probably make up a huge amount of usage of Twitter. Twitter remains useful for scanning headlines and breaking news, but outside of that the service is a complete mess.
- enos 9y agoI propose marking bots as such. Keep following useful bots. But users will at least know that a troll is automated and are able to act accordingly without wasting time and energy.
- mv4 9y ago"Replicants are like any other machine: they're either a benefit or a hazard." Yes. Make bots legitimate, with verified bot status for ones that are truthful and helpful to the end users.
- golangnews 9y agoPosts and interactions like likes or retweets via the api should be marked as automated, but identifying users as bots is problematic and not very useful as there are good bots and bad bots. Many users use some automation and that’s a good thing, e.g. posting blog posts when published, bots to repost top #shithnsays for those who want to follow it, that amusing horse books bot etc. More problematic than bots to me are the many many ways the twitter platform simply rewards the wrong thing, from verified nazis to crowds of trolls and spamming hashtags.
- trumpownsyou420 9y agoif you use twitter, you're an idiot. nothing else to it.
- Muuuchem 9y agoWent to a meetup at twitter the other night. We got a cryptic response to that question "don't worry, we are working on it". Someone asked them why they don't just require every account be verified, or non-verified accounts labeled as boys, but they avoided the question.
- jerkstate 9y agoI hope someone else appreciates the irony of the anonymous message projected onto the side of the Twitter building, ostensibly intended to amplify the opinion-holder's voice and sway public opinion.
- cwkoss 9y agoOne thing I've been contemplating is the extent to which feedback on twitter can alter a user's opinion or focus on a given topic. Ex. - make a bot network of 100 bots. - identify some accounts, split them into control and experimental groups - choose a topic, such as "NFL" - every time someone in experimental group tweets something about the NFL, like or retweet it a dozen times from a random slice of your bots - do this for a few weeks - at end of few weeks, does experimental group tweet about NFL more frequently than control? Has the sentiment within their tweets gotten any more extreme?
- tw1010 9y agoOh cool, this is something I've been thinking about too. Please, if you feel you have the time, do email me (see my bio) with some lessons if you manage to build something.
- nkingsy 9y agoSeems inevitable that more governments will follow china into the digital identity business. Just because Black Mirror made a dystopian version of this doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
- wimagguc 9y agoOh, sounds like while most bots are only posting stuff, some do actually consume it for analytics-reposts-engagement. This is huge because (wait for it) Twitter could be the first social network written and consumed entirely by bots!