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"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere
by ohashi 9y ago
"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that
have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For
example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets
promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of
thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The
core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original
Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of
the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around
57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal
tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater
detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to
variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails
from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the
time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas."
Relevant portion based on title. Part of an anti-spam effort.
- cabaalis 9y agoI've never understood Twitter's "anti-spam" effort. The only "spam" I've ever seen on twitter is when someone I am following likes another tweet, or it tells me I should follow someone because someone I'm following follows them. I'm not interested in either of those suggestions. I'm only interested in what the exact account I'm following tweets or retweets, because I decided to follow it. It seems to me that if the system worked as intended, I would see none of this mess because I'm not interested in following the bots. They can tweet away all they want, hundreds of thousand of them, to crickets. I would venture to say that the "spam" is less of a problem for what users really want and more of a problem for their efforts that try to increase user retention/engagement and therefore ad rev.
- bdcravens 9y agoFor a long time if I posted something that the general public would be interested in (say, containing "iPhone") I'd get @ mentioned by a spam account for a related scam ("free iPhone!") or an unrelated spam for a "dating" site by an account with an NSFW profile pic.
- wesleytodd 9y agoI just recently learned you can hide retweets from your timeline for an individual user. I don't think you can turn off the likes, but that would be a good addition.
- dmix 9y agoI believe the "don't show retweets for x user" feature is limited to the web interface and is not available in the mobile/desktop apps, which is basically the only way I consume Twitter. Which is disappointing. I may be wrong here (I hope).
- porfirium 9y agoYou are wrong, it is available in the apps as well.
- lkerrekfjk 9y agoYep, me as well, I wish I could activate that globally for all people I follow at the same time. Retweets are the worse in terms of useless signaling. They also added a filter filtering tweets containing words. What I would like is the opposite, for user U, filter all tweets that do not contain word X,Y,Z so people stay on topic. I'd also like to see a record of the tweet that made me follow user U. There is quite A LOT of that these platforms can do if really want to make the experience better and stop the flow of information that is completely irrelevant to the user.
- dilap 9y agoHere's a tip: If you make a list of users and look at that, the list will contain only tweets and retweets of the members, in chronological order. (I.e., like how the main timeline used to work, before twitter messed it up.)
- hsod 9y agoLots of people use the Search functionality, and lots of people follow hashtags and trending topics.