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Twitter has a much higher cost for false positives. If 1% of the accounts this article thought were bots were actually legitimate, no big deal. If Twitter banne

Twitter has a much higher cost for false positives. If 1% of the accounts this article thought were bots were actually legitimate, no big deal. If Twitter banned that 1%, that's ten thousand pissed off people. Also, bot makers don't care about fooling the New York Times, they care about fooling Twitter. If Twitter applied this analysis, the bot makers would adapt to it. It only looks like it works until you start to use it.

kibwen 9y ago
> If Twitter applied this analysis, the bot makers would adapt to it. The problem with the arms-race argument here is that it implies that just because an arms race is inevitable that the only acceptable course of action is total capitulation. Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference. They just simply don't want to. (As for false positives, I've seen plenty of people whose accounts were suspended for reasons unclear to them; Twitter seems to care very little whether its captive userbase is pissed off or not.)
- kbenson 9y ago
  I don't think it implies that unless you've already accepted they aren't doing anything. I think it's entirely possible that a lower class of bots are routinely blocked, but a higher class are always mutating to get past the latest filtering, so has a large fairly stable population.
- dmoy 9y ago
  > Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference. How would they do this without triggering enough false positives to destroy their product? I mean seriously, if you are capable of doing this that well, you could probably walk into a job paying >>$750k/yr at any of the large tech companies, because they'd be falling all over themselves trying to get at your magic.
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    Seems like, if you detect a bot, you should impose a captcha on every x actions. Not enough to ruin your customer's experience, but enough to make botting harder.
    - dmoy 9y ago
      I would be absolutely stunned if Twitter et al. hadn't already tried this...
      - jimnotgym 9y ago
        I wouldn't be suprised at all. Go find an openly racist account and report them. Two weeks later Twitter will agree with you...but not ban the account
        dawnerd 9y ago
        I’ve come to the conclusion after reporting hundreds of obvious spam/racism/hate/etc accounts that twitter just doesn’t care. It increases their metrics and that’s all they want. Makes the share holders happy to see numbers going up and sadly in turn it does increase ad views.
      - ImSkeptical 9y ago
        I would be curious to know how this failed, if they did try it. Are captcha automatable? You could make it a bit better by challenging every X actions, and have X decline with a failed captcha.
        dmoy 9y ago
        Captcha has issues in that: - captcha that isn't hard for humans is often easy to automate - captcha that is hard to automate frustrates a lot of humans too - and to add insult to injury you can "automate" the hard ones too by paying like $1 per 1000 captchas or something (think Amazon Turk like stuff)
  - 9y ago
- pm90 9y ago
  > They just simply don't want to. This really does seem to be the case. And I find it incredibly distasteful that they were used by DJT in his campaign and continues to be used. It was rarely a place where politicians posted anything, and now it seems to be the first place where any of them do.
  - slavik81 9y ago
    > It was rarely a place where politicians posted anything Twitter was founded in 2006 and Barack Obama joined in 2007. Today he has 15.4k tweets. Seems like a lot to me.
- ball_of_lint 9y ago
  There are plenty of ways besides suspending accounts to make the cost of botting too high to be profitable. A captcha for example is fairly frictionless for a typical user.

kibwen 9y ago

> If Twitter applied this analysis, the bot makers would adapt to it. The problem with the arms-race argument here is that it implies that just because an arms race is inevitable that the only acceptable course of action is total capitulation. Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference. They just simply don't want to. (As for false positives, I've seen plenty of people whose accounts were suspended for reasons unclear to them; Twitter seems to care very little whether its captive userbase is pissed off or not.)

kbenson 9y ago
I don't think it implies that unless you've already accepted they aren't doing anything. I think it's entirely possible that a lower class of bots are routinely blocked, but a higher class are always mutating to get past the latest filtering, so has a large fairly stable population.
dmoy 9y ago
> Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference. How would they do this without triggering enough false positives to destroy their product? I mean seriously, if you are capable of doing this that well, you could probably walk into a job paying >>$750k/yr at any of the large tech companies, because they'd be falling all over themselves trying to get at your magic.
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  Seems like, if you detect a bot, you should impose a captcha on every x actions. Not enough to ruin your customer's experience, but enough to make botting harder.
  - dmoy 9y ago
    I would be absolutely stunned if Twitter et al. hadn't already tried this...
    - jimnotgym 9y ago
      I wouldn't be suprised at all. Go find an openly racist account and report them. Two weeks later Twitter will agree with you...but not ban the account
      - dawnerd 9y ago
        I’ve come to the conclusion after reporting hundreds of obvious spam/racism/hate/etc accounts that twitter just doesn’t care. It increases their metrics and that’s all they want. Makes the share holders happy to see numbers going up and sadly in turn it does increase ad views.
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      I would be curious to know how this failed, if they did try it. Are captcha automatable? You could make it a bit better by challenging every X actions, and have X decline with a failed captcha.
      - dmoy 9y ago
        Captcha has issues in that: - captcha that isn't hard for humans is often easy to automate - captcha that is hard to automate frustrates a lot of humans too - and to add insult to injury you can "automate" the hard ones too by paying like $1 per 1000 captchas or something (think Amazon Turk like stuff)
- 9y ago
pm90 9y ago
> They just simply don't want to. This really does seem to be the case. And I find it incredibly distasteful that they were used by DJT in his campaign and continues to be used. It was rarely a place where politicians posted anything, and now it seems to be the first place where any of them do.
- slavik81 9y ago
  > It was rarely a place where politicians posted anything Twitter was founded in 2006 and Barack Obama joined in 2007. Today he has 15.4k tweets. Seems like a lot to me.
ball_of_lint 9y ago
There are plenty of ways besides suspending accounts to make the cost of botting too high to be profitable. A captcha for example is fairly frictionless for a typical user.