4 ms·
4) It's not hard to identify bots with 95% accuracy, which is good enough for reporting, but you need 99.9% accuracy in order to delete their accounts or else t
by tlb 9y ago
4) It's not hard to identify bots with 95% accuracy, which is good enough for reporting, but you need 99.9% accuracy in order to delete their accounts or else too many genuine accounts will be wrongly terminated.
- tmalsburg2 9y agoSuper easy to solve: identify likely bots, suspend account, and let owner do something trivial that only a human can do. False positives solved but the cost of maintaining large amounts of bots are prohibitive. Also, high-profile non-bot acounts should be trivial to identify with near certainty.
- jimnotgym 9y agoThey could join the rest of the internet and serve a Captcha to the suspicious accounts!
- greenleafjacob 9y agoThey already do this but instead of a CAPTCHA they require a SMS. I don’t know if they had the option to enter a CAPTCHA instead?
- robryan 9y agoIt shouldn’t be too hard to get at networks. If you identify an account with suspect followers and then look at the followers common follows and follow dates. They can spread out the follows but still to get it done it any reasonable time the follow times are going to be pretty close.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere are actions other than deletion which can be undertaken. You might target suspect accounts for increased validation -- Captcha or other elements, or simply logging them out more frequently. Changing programmatic elements such that they cannot be scripted as easily (this is one of the primary credible arguments I've seen against APIs for large public services). (Craigslist, and several other services, have applied what's effectively a service-degredation level to accounts suspected of malicious activity. It's not a hard fail, and it's possible for a real human to get past the hassle, but it slows down attackers considerably.)
- megous 9y agoHow would they know on scale what removed accounts were controlled by a human? Some people may just not want to return after the ban. Bots can probably create new accounts and complain too and a few complaining high profile twitter users that would filter out to media to be verified by journalists don't really make a good study.
- dredmorbius 9y agoInterventions programmes of almost any sort face this problem, and it's part of an ongoing monitoring and evaluation effort. Ultimately: you monitor direct and indirect effects, offer an appeals and communications process, and try to sort out who is and is not participating in good faith.