10 ms·

College Kids Doing What Twitter Won't

111 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

s17n 9y ago
They made a ML model to identify twitter bots. To get their training data, they identified 100 accounts that appeared to be bots, and then assumed that all their followers were also bots. They used verified accounts as their sample of non-bot accounts. They claim they "identify bots 93.5 percent of the time." No data is given about false positives.
- donmatito 9y ago
  While your comment certainly points a flaw in their approach, it is not something that cannot be addressed with a little bit of manpower/insider knowledge/more data. They have demonstrated a proof of concept that hunting bots on Twitter can be achieved, and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted
  - dmix 9y ago
    Having false positives are quite serious though, especially when it comes to shutting accounts down at scale. Sure it works on their small sample test runs, but anyone who's applied these algorithms in real life in an automated fashion understand the risks of false positives is usually far higher in practice. You will basically be put at risk for following 'controversial' accounts on Twitter of having your account delete accidentally. And businesses will have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to use legitimate automated scripts to manage accounts. It also seriously deters anonymous online speech if they force a big percentage of users to provide a unique phone number to prove they aren't a bot (the current Twitter strategy for countering spam). Not to mention the liberal sharing of information with nation states, surreptitiously or otherwise, even for people not trying to be anonymous. A phone number is a critical identifier in the surveillance industry. Getting this accurate is very important and I feel like that is being heavily downplayed in this article.
    - samastur 9y ago
      Twitter already uses automation with false positives. For example get enough followers in short enough amount of time and your account can be taken offline. One of popular ways to using bots as attack weapon these days. No false positives ship has already sailed. What you can best hope now is timely response to mistakes (and as few of them as possible).
    - lukasschwab 9y ago
      Deletion isn't the only option for escalation; Twitter could assemble a risk factor for a given account and opt to present captchas, for example, rather than automatically deleting. Scale captcha frequency with the risk factor. Captchas are certainly not foolproof, but they up the difficulty of running a huge number of phony accounts while having a minimal impact on normal Twitter usage.
  - apeace 9y ago
    I think there is more than one flaw. They started by identifying "left- or right-leaning" tweets. Then they decided that everything in-between were bots. Who decides what is left and what is right, and who decided that anything other than those extremes is "fake news"? There are ethical questions here. It scares me that we now find it acceptable to classify accounts as "bots" or "Russian-backed" because of any content in the tweets, even if it's #LockHerUp or #BuildTheWall. If people really believe these things, shouldn't they be allowed to say them? What if tomorrow, something that you strongly believe in becomes labelled "fake news" or "propaganda", and your own accounts are shut down? The methodology is flawed in the most fundamental way. There are other technologies that can be used for detecting bots[0]. Twitter should use it. [0] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introd...
    - rohanphadte 9y ago
      Hey, I'm a creator of the tool written in the article! In our model, we look at hundreds of features per account. Polarizing tweet content is not the only thing the model looks at. If an account is tweeting OC content, it's a clear indication that account is human. Twitter's policy allows bots of their platform, and most are harmless! There are bots that tweet out the upcoming songs on a radio station. Unfortunately, a CAPTCHA would eliminate all bots, not the ones that spread fake news or claim compromised accounts.
      - torinmr 9y ago
        It seems like there's an obvious solution to the problem of how to crack down on the types of bot your AI tries to detect, without removing legitimate boots: Give users the ability to designate their account as a self-reported bot. Accounts designated this way would be identified as a bot in the Twitter UI, and would be exempt from captchas.
  - Balgair 9y ago
    > and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted There's the rub, Twitter doesn't want to do that. Why? Good question, but the WSJ adage applies: Follow the money. I think it's because bots make up most of their users and that getting rid of them is a net negative to them. Not just because they can make stockholders and advertisers think they have more people online than they do. But because trying to continually cull the bots would cost too much as the bot makers up the ante every time. It's not profitable to chase them and it seems that the people that pay Twitter don't care about them. Also, by bot, I do not mean the hydration sensor in your tomato garden or the code that pings your followers to watch you on Twitch. I mean bots that are trying to masquerade as real humans to get you to buys stuff or vote some way or another. Essentially, things making an attempt at the Turing test.
    - danudey 9y ago
      When people start flooding off the service and the only people left are nazis and bots, what will their revenue look like then? It'll become the reddit of social media, with small, reasonable groups overshadowed by overwhelmingly toxic, hostile, and destructive forces. How long until their blind eye towards harassment, racism, abuse, and booting collapses any value they have? How long until the average person perceives Twitter as a place where racists congregate and no one else can bring themselves to visit? And when it does, will they pull a reddit and suddenly grow a conscience, miraculously saying "Oh there's a problem on our service and we're going to charge to the rescue!", or are they going to go 4chan and hide behind "freedom of speech" to excuse the filth their platform breeds?
      - rafiki6 9y ago
        Reddit is the reddit of social media...
      - Balgair 9y ago
        > ... going to go 4chan and hide behind "freedom of speech" to excuse the filth their platform breeds? I mean, I don't think 4chan is doing that at all. You give the sons-of-moot too much brainpower. It's a bathroom stall's wall, policing it is silly. That said, when will Twitter crash over the bot stuff? Wall Street doesn't think it will crash, so it won't. When Wall Street thinks it will crash, then it will. However, Twitter is at the foundation of the ad-scam that most of the Big 4 are running. When that goes belly up, Twitter will be along for the ride, but it's more of a Haunted House than a Log-ride. Scary. Again, this is my thought process, who knows.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > and then assumed that all their followers were also bots This seems like a fatal flaw, are the subsequent layers also bots? I mean, if bots have no human followers, what is the problem?
throwaway2016a 9y ago
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337
beamatronic 9y ago
Monetizing a large user base?
- fleitz 9y ago
  No kidding.
gondo 9y ago
so what are they doing in one sentence?
- nicoburns 9y ago
  Using machine learning to attempt to detect twitter accounts backed by bots.
- _jal 9y ago
  Running a service that attempts to determine if a given Twitter account is a political bot.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Writing an automated service that classifies if a twitter account is a political bot. No word on their error rates.
  - finniananderson 9y ago
    It's impossible to determine the error rate - there is no way of knowing for sure if an account is a bot or not. If there was, this model would be useless. I'd be interested to know how they trained it though, given they didn't have any true data to check against
    - giarc 9y ago
      They could check it against known bots though.
      - Bartweiss 9y ago
        That's only valid if the known bots are a random sample of all bots. They can't test against a large array of public bots because they're only detecting political bots, not everything automated. So they'd have to train/test on "accounts which are definitely known to be bots, but trying to hide it". Meaning, presumably, the least-convincing bots or bots specific to a previously-exposed network.
jerkstate 9y ago
Oh boy, this doesn't sound like a biased model at all
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Yeah, these guys have absolutely no cost for being wrong.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    What else would you expect would happen? In a town without law, it's only a matter of time until the vigilantes show up. Either Twitter is going to police its platform, or users are going to start policing it for them.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      I expect this will have no real impact and these guys will have to find something else to do with their time.
bob_theslob646 9y ago
This is a repost. What these kids are doing, is what Twitter is doing. Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this. This article comes off as if Twitter does not know what they are doing, which I think is hard to believe. What I think these kids are going to find out, it's not that easy as it sounds. Couldn't anyone do what these people are doing with a couple hundred bucks using Google cloud services and their natural langage API to label positive and negative tweets. Seeing news like this which is not news, makes me realize how gullable people are about what goes into 'models'. People have no idea how hard nlp is. That is all lol.
- duxup 9y ago
  I'm sure Twitter could. I think the "won't" may be accurate as if Twitter did it and chose not to act that would look terrible. And the scope of the bot problem may make their user base look a lot less attractive if they admitted it. Granted everyone suspects, but there may be a valid reason they don't want to "know" at Twitter.
  - theashbhat 9y ago
    Hey! Creator here. We agree - as independent of Twitter we have a considerable amount of freedom in how we build this. However Twitter can and should be doing much more. For example with a model they can start placing captchas before Tweets. In addition to building the model we went about trying build our own bots. To do this we went on forums and contacted individuals selling "aged" accounts. It turns out its as simple as sending $4 over paypal to get a compromised account. These are accounts with histories, real followers, and real people behind them. We bought 11 of these and were able to automate them within the hour of purchasing them. They also started receiving replies to their retweets and content almost immediately from all over twitter. The ease of setting up these compromised accounts as bots was also incredibly worrisome. We've found high confidence heuristics to determine that an account has been compromised. If we can - Twitter should be able to as well. We're ultimately a bit confused over Twitter's inactivity here. We also haven't heard anything from the company. Here's our analysis if you want to read more. analysis: https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-7b7ec57256ae https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on...
giarc 9y ago
I can't help but think of a story (and a company) that helps people out when they can't escape a bad Google search result. For example, you search Bill Smith and only bad things come up. For a long time, the play book to improve your online reputation was to get rid of those bad links. However, a company (and I can't remember the name) decided it might be easier to just create better links/stories about the person and let google bury the bad stuff. Therefore when someone searches Bill Smith, they see the good stuff. Anyways - back to the topic at hand here. Perhaps the solution to these bad bots isn't to try and stop them, but to build better bots that spread #realnews and aren't as toxic? Maybe it wouldn't work, clickbait and catchy headlines are more "share worthy" than the latest WSJ front page article, but maybe we need a new strategy?
- chrisdbaldwin 9y ago
  Fight bots with bots. I like it.
- weavie 9y ago
  Can #realnews actually exist in a completely objective and non toxic manner?
  - grzm 9y ago
    There are entire journalism courses on the topic of objectivity. AIUI, the takeaway is that humans are inherently biased and a part of good journalism is recognizing that and minimizing its effects to provide the best coverage one can. The idea that there can be something completely objective here is in some ways naïve. You can get a good overview in the Wikipedia articles on Journalism[0] and Media Bias[1]: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias As for non-toxic, I definitely think that's possible, but involves a bigger conversation as to how people communicate with each other: the same self-awareness that's necessary for good journalism is necessary when people talk with each other day-to-day. It's not clear to me how we rebuild our ability to engage each other in a non-toxic way about important and divisive topics, but I think it's necessary and well-worth trying to figure out.
dudul 9y ago
"a Twitter user who is falsely identified as a bot has little recourse to dispute the charges." That's the spirit! What was this saying again? "Better to convict 10 innocent men than to let at least 1 guilty go unpunished." That must be it...
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Oh the horror of being cut off from twitter...
  - dudul 9y ago
    In a way, I agree with you. I despise Twitter and what people use it for. However, if being cut off from Twitter is not a big deal, why is this bot hunt worth doing? If we assume that it's important to get rid off fake users, it must be because accessing a platform like Twitter is important.
garybro 9y ago
Tried my account. Says I'm a bot. My rating: incorrect.
- mberger 9y ago
  That's what a bot would want us to think.
- eksu 9y ago
  I never used twitter before the 2016 election. I don't use twitter to communicate with people I know in real life, but I know my father and I both started using it as a place we can put on a pseudoname and talk about politics openly, without having to worry about bothering friends & family like on facebook. Both my own and my father's accounts were classified as "exhibit patterns conducive to a political bot or highly moderated account tweeting political propaganda.", which is in a sense kinda accurate because they are solely political outlets for us. I think this is a feature, not a bug, and probably the only use case the service has provided for me. I feel like twitter, tumblr, and other semi-anonymous networks have always been pretty political. I think the only thing that has changed is that people see twitter as news - stations actively report about what's going on on twitter - and that online political discussions are no longer dominated by liberal / social justice voices.
- dudul 9y ago
  Maybe you're a bot who has achieved consciousness and doesn't think he is a bot anymore.
- hawleyal 9y ago
  Post less bot-like shit?
samsolomon 9y ago
It seems that the people who are most likely to tell human from bot are the ones who would use Chrome extensions. I am glad people are working on solutions, but I'd love to see an approach that works for all users. For example there could be a Twitter account that replies to every bot tweet and those included in the bot's tweets. Accounts that have a high likelihood of being a bot would get a reply stating that the account is likely a bot. I'm just spitballing—certainly, this would push up on Twitter's API limitations. But it seems like there a much better way to identify fake accounts than through a Chrome extension.
- theashbhat 9y ago
  One of the creators here: Yup! Our current users are more engaged and active on Twitter than the average users. The chrome extension and website release also helps improve our model significantly. We get feedback on how it works in the wild and false positives that we can use to improve our model on.
1024core 9y ago
Reminds me of the early days of spam fighting. It looked so easy: just build a Bayesian model and boom! Spam begone! Sadly, there's a drawback to open systems (like this one), that the robot controllers can keep probing for weaknesses and keep changing their style. Of course, such extension also begs the question: how will they (the creators) make money? "Volume", you say?
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  It's also reminiscent of tracking payment fraud. Algorithmic approaches are potent, but they're not a stable fix when your problem is adversarial and open-ended - scammers have nigh-unlimited time to hunt for new angles. As I remember it, that's a major piece of what got Palantir started - PayPal's fraud-fighting system tracked known attacks algorithmically, but they needed visualization tools to locate new attacks. That said, there's definitely an argument for attacking the ease of creation and longevity for bot accounts. Payment scammers are an endless problem because they profit on individual wins; bot networks need some sort of protracted presence to influence people.
- theashbhat 9y ago
  hey! One of said creators here! We haven't figured out how to monetize / properly fund this yet. It's more so a problem we saw and attempted to solve. The cost right now is a couple hundred dollars month in server costs.
  - 1024core 9y ago
    Please don't take my comment(s) as criticism: you're doing a good job. Even if you don't make any money doing this, it's a fun thing to do. In the worst case Twitter will (acqui)hire you.
0xbear 9y ago
Why only mention pro-Trump bots though? There were (and _still are_) tons of pro-HRC bots as well, synchronously posting identical text and passing it off as their own tweets. They aren’t even trying to hide it much.
- theashbhat 9y ago
  Creator here! We do identify bot-like activity on both sides of the spectrum (pro-hillary and pro-trump).
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    The question wasn’t actually addressed to you, but to the author of the article linked to the post. They’re also pushing the “Russian interference” narrative, but as far as I can tell your product can’t point out the source.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Charge 2c per tweet and the issue will go away. The reason bots exists is because there's zero friction to them.
- mseebach 9y ago
  "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"
Floegipoky 9y ago
Hot take: false positives don't matter. If somebody is using the service in a way that makes them indistinguishable from a propaganda bot, the platform and the discourse that it's supposed to further are better off without them.
- hawleyal 9y ago
  Boom!
  - sctb 9y ago
    Please stop.
nunobrito 9y ago
So much bias on that article against Russia, falsely gives the idea that Russia was the major actor pushing artificial tweets. Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters instead of being identified as paid comments: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hillary-clinton-correct-the-record/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hill... This is a perversion of democracy, not even taking weight the proven federal crimes to which this former presidential candidate seems immune. The means to bring back balance to democracy are certainly in our hands. This also includes exposing what is wrong with the upper echelons of western society.
- hawleyal 9y ago
  What
- vkou 9y ago
  > Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters instead of being identified as paid comments You do understand how campaigning works, right? Not how you want it to work, but how it actually works.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    > You do understand how campaigning works, right? Really? I'm asking because I don't know the answer; don't you have to identify yourself (like TV ads that say "I'm Obama, and I approve this message").
    - gatesphere 9y ago
      Only on TV.
  - handedness 9y ago
    Astroturfing is a different thing, yes, but it's still a thing nonetheless.
shawnee_ 9y ago
But the very existence of their project raises an important question: If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the same? Twitter has every incentive to lie, to minimize, to shove this under the rug. As a fairly recent IPO with virtually flat/negative user growth, and lots of fed up people (like me) abandoning the platform all together, it is desperate to squelch any negative info that Wall Street might use against it. Unfortunately, there's no favorable outcome for Twitter shareholders in either case. Twitter fesses up about its actual percent of bots (reality is likely closer to 50 percent than the 5 percent it claims) and its numbers go down even more. Twitter continues to lie and folks like the ones in this article expose them ... not good either because every advertising dollar it's getting is "truthfully" reaching fewer actual humans.
neo4sure 9y ago
Hey I used it on some MAGA supports and immediately found BOTS. Check out botcheck.me. Some of them surprisingly didn't come up as BOTS.
dispossess 9y ago
> If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the same? Because the cost to the kids for a false positive is 0. The cost to Twitter could be company destroying lawsuits.
MK999 9y ago
college kids such a strange expression when are you considered an adult?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

111 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

s17n 9y ago

They made a ML model to identify twitter bots. To get their training data, they identified 100 accounts that appeared to be bots, and then assumed that all their followers were also bots. They used verified accounts as their sample of non-bot accounts. They claim they "identify bots 93.5 percent of the time." No data is given about false positives.

donmatito 9y ago
While your comment certainly points a flaw in their approach, it is not something that cannot be addressed with a little bit of manpower/insider knowledge/more data. They have demonstrated a proof of concept that hunting bots on Twitter can be achieved, and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted
- dmix 9y ago
  Having false positives are quite serious though, especially when it comes to shutting accounts down at scale. Sure it works on their small sample test runs, but anyone who's applied these algorithms in real life in an automated fashion understand the risks of false positives is usually far higher in practice. You will basically be put at risk for following 'controversial' accounts on Twitter of having your account delete accidentally. And businesses will have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to use legitimate automated scripts to manage accounts. It also seriously deters anonymous online speech if they force a big percentage of users to provide a unique phone number to prove they aren't a bot (the current Twitter strategy for countering spam). Not to mention the liberal sharing of information with nation states, surreptitiously or otherwise, even for people not trying to be anonymous. A phone number is a critical identifier in the surveillance industry. Getting this accurate is very important and I feel like that is being heavily downplayed in this article.
  - samastur 9y ago
    Twitter already uses automation with false positives. For example get enough followers in short enough amount of time and your account can be taken offline. One of popular ways to using bots as attack weapon these days. No false positives ship has already sailed. What you can best hope now is timely response to mistakes (and as few of them as possible).
  - lukasschwab 9y ago
    Deletion isn't the only option for escalation; Twitter could assemble a risk factor for a given account and opt to present captchas, for example, rather than automatically deleting. Scale captcha frequency with the risk factor. Captchas are certainly not foolproof, but they up the difficulty of running a huge number of phony accounts while having a minimal impact on normal Twitter usage.
- apeace 9y ago
  I think there is more than one flaw. They started by identifying "left- or right-leaning" tweets. Then they decided that everything in-between were bots. Who decides what is left and what is right, and who decided that anything other than those extremes is "fake news"? There are ethical questions here. It scares me that we now find it acceptable to classify accounts as "bots" or "Russian-backed" because of any content in the tweets, even if it's #LockHerUp or #BuildTheWall. If people really believe these things, shouldn't they be allowed to say them? What if tomorrow, something that you strongly believe in becomes labelled "fake news" or "propaganda", and your own accounts are shut down? The methodology is flawed in the most fundamental way. There are other technologies that can be used for detecting bots[0]. Twitter should use it. [0] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introd...
  - rohanphadte 9y ago
    Hey, I'm a creator of the tool written in the article! In our model, we look at hundreds of features per account. Polarizing tweet content is not the only thing the model looks at. If an account is tweeting OC content, it's a clear indication that account is human. Twitter's policy allows bots of their platform, and most are harmless! There are bots that tweet out the upcoming songs on a radio station. Unfortunately, a CAPTCHA would eliminate all bots, not the ones that spread fake news or claim compromised accounts.
    - torinmr 9y ago
      It seems like there's an obvious solution to the problem of how to crack down on the types of bot your AI tries to detect, without removing legitimate boots: Give users the ability to designate their account as a self-reported bot. Accounts designated this way would be identified as a bot in the Twitter UI, and would be exempt from captchas.
- Balgair 9y ago
  > and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted There's the rub, Twitter doesn't want to do that. Why? Good question, but the WSJ adage applies: Follow the money. I think it's because bots make up most of their users and that getting rid of them is a net negative to them. Not just because they can make stockholders and advertisers think they have more people online than they do. But because trying to continually cull the bots would cost too much as the bot makers up the ante every time. It's not profitable to chase them and it seems that the people that pay Twitter don't care about them. Also, by bot, I do not mean the hydration sensor in your tomato garden or the code that pings your followers to watch you on Twitch. I mean bots that are trying to masquerade as real humans to get you to buys stuff or vote some way or another. Essentially, things making an attempt at the Turing test.
  - danudey 9y ago
    When people start flooding off the service and the only people left are nazis and bots, what will their revenue look like then? It'll become the reddit of social media, with small, reasonable groups overshadowed by overwhelmingly toxic, hostile, and destructive forces. How long until their blind eye towards harassment, racism, abuse, and booting collapses any value they have? How long until the average person perceives Twitter as a place where racists congregate and no one else can bring themselves to visit? And when it does, will they pull a reddit and suddenly grow a conscience, miraculously saying "Oh there's a problem on our service and we're going to charge to the rescue!", or are they going to go 4chan and hide behind "freedom of speech" to excuse the filth their platform breeds?
    - rafiki6 9y ago
      Reddit is the reddit of social media...
    - Balgair 9y ago
      > ... going to go 4chan and hide behind "freedom of speech" to excuse the filth their platform breeds? I mean, I don't think 4chan is doing that at all. You give the sons-of-moot too much brainpower. It's a bathroom stall's wall, policing it is silly. That said, when will Twitter crash over the bot stuff? Wall Street doesn't think it will crash, so it won't. When Wall Street thinks it will crash, then it will. However, Twitter is at the foundation of the ad-scam that most of the Big 4 are running. When that goes belly up, Twitter will be along for the ride, but it's more of a Haunted House than a Log-ride. Scary. Again, this is my thought process, who knows.
microcolonel 9y ago
> and then assumed that all their followers were also bots This seems like a fatal flaw, are the subsequent layers also bots? I mean, if bots have no human followers, what is the problem?

throwaway2016a 9y ago

This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337

beamatronic 9y ago

Monetizing a large user base?

fleitz 9y ago
No kidding.

gondo 9y ago

so what are they doing in one sentence?

nicoburns 9y ago
Using machine learning to attempt to detect twitter accounts backed by bots.
_jal 9y ago
Running a service that attempts to determine if a given Twitter account is a political bot.
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Writing an automated service that classifies if a twitter account is a political bot. No word on their error rates.
- finniananderson 9y ago
  It's impossible to determine the error rate - there is no way of knowing for sure if an account is a bot or not. If there was, this model would be useless. I'd be interested to know how they trained it though, given they didn't have any true data to check against
  - giarc 9y ago
    They could check it against known bots though.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      That's only valid if the known bots are a random sample of all bots. They can't test against a large array of public bots because they're only detecting political bots, not everything automated. So they'd have to train/test on "accounts which are definitely known to be bots, but trying to hide it". Meaning, presumably, the least-convincing bots or bots specific to a previously-exposed network.

jerkstate 9y ago

Oh boy, this doesn't sound like a biased model at all

Eridrus 9y ago
Yeah, these guys have absolutely no cost for being wrong.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  What else would you expect would happen? In a town without law, it's only a matter of time until the vigilantes show up. Either Twitter is going to police its platform, or users are going to start policing it for them.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I expect this will have no real impact and these guys will have to find something else to do with their time.

bob_theslob646 9y ago

This is a repost. What these kids are doing, is what Twitter is doing. Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this. This article comes off as if Twitter does not know what they are doing, which I think is hard to believe. What I think these kids are going to find out, it's not that easy as it sounds. Couldn't anyone do what these people are doing with a couple hundred bucks using Google cloud services and their natural langage API to label positive and negative tweets. Seeing news like this which is not news, makes me realize how gullable people are about what goes into 'models'. People have no idea how hard nlp is. That is all lol.

duxup 9y ago
I'm sure Twitter could. I think the "won't" may be accurate as if Twitter did it and chose not to act that would look terrible. And the scope of the bot problem may make their user base look a lot less attractive if they admitted it. Granted everyone suspects, but there may be a valid reason they don't want to "know" at Twitter.
- theashbhat 9y ago
  Hey! Creator here. We agree - as independent of Twitter we have a considerable amount of freedom in how we build this. However Twitter can and should be doing much more. For example with a model they can start placing captchas before Tweets. In addition to building the model we went about trying build our own bots. To do this we went on forums and contacted individuals selling "aged" accounts. It turns out its as simple as sending $4 over paypal to get a compromised account. These are accounts with histories, real followers, and real people behind them. We bought 11 of these and were able to automate them within the hour of purchasing them. They also started receiving replies to their retweets and content almost immediately from all over twitter. The ease of setting up these compromised accounts as bots was also incredibly worrisome. We've found high confidence heuristics to determine that an account has been compromised. If we can - Twitter should be able to as well. We're ultimately a bit confused over Twitter's inactivity here. We also haven't heard anything from the company. Here's our analysis if you want to read more. analysis: https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-7b7ec57256ae https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on...

giarc 9y ago

I can't help but think of a story (and a company) that helps people out when they can't escape a bad Google search result. For example, you search Bill Smith and only bad things come up. For a long time, the play book to improve your online reputation was to get rid of those bad links. However, a company (and I can't remember the name) decided it might be easier to just create better links/stories about the person and let google bury the bad stuff. Therefore when someone searches Bill Smith, they see the good stuff. Anyways - back to the topic at hand here. Perhaps the solution to these bad bots isn't to try and stop them, but to build better bots that spread #realnews and aren't as toxic? Maybe it wouldn't work, clickbait and catchy headlines are more "share worthy" than the latest WSJ front page article, but maybe we need a new strategy?

chrisdbaldwin 9y ago
Fight bots with bots. I like it.
weavie 9y ago
Can #realnews actually exist in a completely objective and non toxic manner?
- grzm 9y ago
  There are entire journalism courses on the topic of objectivity. AIUI, the takeaway is that humans are inherently biased and a part of good journalism is recognizing that and minimizing its effects to provide the best coverage one can. The idea that there can be something completely objective here is in some ways naïve. You can get a good overview in the Wikipedia articles on Journalism[0] and Media Bias[1]: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias As for non-toxic, I definitely think that's possible, but involves a bigger conversation as to how people communicate with each other: the same self-awareness that's necessary for good journalism is necessary when people talk with each other day-to-day. It's not clear to me how we rebuild our ability to engage each other in a non-toxic way about important and divisive topics, but I think it's necessary and well-worth trying to figure out.

dudul 9y ago

"a Twitter user who is falsely identified as a bot has little recourse to dispute the charges." That's the spirit! What was this saying again? "Better to convict 10 innocent men than to let at least 1 guilty go unpunished." That must be it...

arkitaip 9y ago
Oh the horror of being cut off from twitter...
- dudul 9y ago
  In a way, I agree with you. I despise Twitter and what people use it for. However, if being cut off from Twitter is not a big deal, why is this bot hunt worth doing? If we assume that it's important to get rid off fake users, it must be because accessing a platform like Twitter is important.

garybro 9y ago

Tried my account. Says I'm a bot. My rating: incorrect.

mberger 9y ago
That's what a bot would want us to think.
eksu 9y ago
I never used twitter before the 2016 election. I don't use twitter to communicate with people I know in real life, but I know my father and I both started using it as a place we can put on a pseudoname and talk about politics openly, without having to worry about bothering friends & family like on facebook. Both my own and my father's accounts were classified as "exhibit patterns conducive to a political bot or highly moderated account tweeting political propaganda.", which is in a sense kinda accurate because they are solely political outlets for us. I think this is a feature, not a bug, and probably the only use case the service has provided for me. I feel like twitter, tumblr, and other semi-anonymous networks have always been pretty political. I think the only thing that has changed is that people see twitter as news - stations actively report about what's going on on twitter - and that online political discussions are no longer dominated by liberal / social justice voices.
dudul 9y ago
Maybe you're a bot who has achieved consciousness and doesn't think he is a bot anymore.
hawleyal 9y ago
Post less bot-like shit?

samsolomon 9y ago

It seems that the people who are most likely to tell human from bot are the ones who would use Chrome extensions. I am glad people are working on solutions, but I'd love to see an approach that works for all users. For example there could be a Twitter account that replies to every bot tweet and those included in the bot's tweets. Accounts that have a high likelihood of being a bot would get a reply stating that the account is likely a bot. I'm just spitballing—certainly, this would push up on Twitter's API limitations. But it seems like there a much better way to identify fake accounts than through a Chrome extension.

theashbhat 9y ago
One of the creators here: Yup! Our current users are more engaged and active on Twitter than the average users. The chrome extension and website release also helps improve our model significantly. We get feedback on how it works in the wild and false positives that we can use to improve our model on.

1024core 9y ago

Reminds me of the early days of spam fighting. It looked so easy: just build a Bayesian model and boom! Spam begone! Sadly, there's a drawback to open systems (like this one), that the robot controllers can keep probing for weaknesses and keep changing their style. Of course, such extension also begs the question: how will they (the creators) make money? "Volume", you say?

Bartweiss 9y ago
It's also reminiscent of tracking payment fraud. Algorithmic approaches are potent, but they're not a stable fix when your problem is adversarial and open-ended - scammers have nigh-unlimited time to hunt for new angles. As I remember it, that's a major piece of what got Palantir started - PayPal's fraud-fighting system tracked known attacks algorithmically, but they needed visualization tools to locate new attacks. That said, there's definitely an argument for attacking the ease of creation and longevity for bot accounts. Payment scammers are an endless problem because they profit on individual wins; bot networks need some sort of protracted presence to influence people.
theashbhat 9y ago
hey! One of said creators here! We haven't figured out how to monetize / properly fund this yet. It's more so a problem we saw and attempted to solve. The cost right now is a couple hundred dollars month in server costs.
- 1024core 9y ago
  Please don't take my comment(s) as criticism: you're doing a good job. Even if you don't make any money doing this, it's a fun thing to do. In the worst case Twitter will (acqui)hire you.

0xbear 9y ago

Why only mention pro-Trump bots though? There were (and _still are_) tons of pro-HRC bots as well, synchronously posting identical text and passing it off as their own tweets. They aren’t even trying to hide it much.

theashbhat 9y ago
Creator here! We do identify bot-like activity on both sides of the spectrum (pro-hillary and pro-trump).
- 0xbear 9y ago
  The question wasn’t actually addressed to you, but to the author of the article linked to the post. They’re also pushing the “Russian interference” narrative, but as far as I can tell your product can’t point out the source.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

Charge 2c per tweet and the issue will go away. The reason bots exists is because there's zero friction to them.

mseebach 9y ago
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"

Floegipoky 9y ago

Hot take: false positives don't matter. If somebody is using the service in a way that makes them indistinguishable from a propaganda bot, the platform and the discourse that it's supposed to further are better off without them.

hawleyal 9y ago
Boom!
- sctb 9y ago
  Please stop.

nunobrito 9y ago

So much bias on that article against Russia, falsely gives the idea that Russia was the major actor pushing artificial tweets. Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters instead of being identified as paid comments: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hillary-clinton-correct-the-record/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hill... This is a perversion of democracy, not even taking weight the proven federal crimes to which this former presidential candidate seems immune. The means to bring back balance to democracy are certainly in our hands. This also includes exposing what is wrong with the upper echelons of western society.

hawleyal 9y ago
What
vkou 9y ago
> Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters instead of being identified as paid comments You do understand how campaigning works, right? Not how you want it to work, but how it actually works.
- praneshp 9y ago
  > You do understand how campaigning works, right? Really? I'm asking because I don't know the answer; don't you have to identify yourself (like TV ads that say "I'm Obama, and I approve this message").
  - gatesphere 9y ago
    Only on TV.
- handedness 9y ago
  Astroturfing is a different thing, yes, but it's still a thing nonetheless.

shawnee_ 9y ago

But the very existence of their project raises an important question: If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the same? Twitter has every incentive to lie, to minimize, to shove this under the rug. As a fairly recent IPO with virtually flat/negative user growth, and lots of fed up people (like me) abandoning the platform all together, it is desperate to squelch any negative info that Wall Street might use against it. Unfortunately, there's no favorable outcome for Twitter shareholders in either case. Twitter fesses up about its actual percent of bots (reality is likely closer to 50 percent than the 5 percent it claims) and its numbers go down even more. Twitter continues to lie and folks like the ones in this article expose them ... not good either because every advertising dollar it's getting is "truthfully" reaching fewer actual humans.

neo4sure 9y ago

Hey I used it on some MAGA supports and immediately found BOTS. Check out botcheck.me. Some of them surprisingly didn't come up as BOTS.

dispossess 9y ago

> If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the same? Because the cost to the kids for a false positive is 0. The cost to Twitter could be company destroying lawsuits.

MK999 9y ago

college kids such a strange expression when are you considered an adult?

deleted 9y ago

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