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It seems to me that there may be a more benign explanation: Facebook/Twitter/etc are in a large-scale, iterative, adversarial game with many opponents. It migh

by colah3 9y ago

It seems to me that there may be a more benign explanation: Facebook/Twitter/etc are in a large-scale, iterative, adversarial game with many opponents. It might be relatively easy for humans to catch clusters of fake followers, but that doesn’t scale. If you try to create heuristics to catch the fake folllowers, the adeversaries will try to adapt. If you try to learn rules, you can update your heuristics faster, but you need trading data, your adversaries could learn too, and adversaries could try to do data poisoning attacks. It seems like a really tricky situation for Facebook and Twitter.

flatline 9y ago
I think that you are right, but only in the qualitative sense, not the quantitative. Spam networks have shown us that taking out a few big players - the largest few sub-graphs of the network - can have dramatic effects on spam rates, reducing them by e.g. a factor of 20. I’m confident that Twitter could identify and eliminate a large percentage of the problem overnight. So far they not even acknowledged that there is a problem. O.P. asked for alternative explanations and people are trying to give these companies the benefit of the doubt. There are actually some much less generous explanations, such as that they are knowingly in the pay of forces adversarial to US interests.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  My belief is that they are still profiling their spammers, and are not acknowledging anything specific as a sort of 'poker face.' >people are trying to give these companies the benefit of the doubt. I think that's a good thing; we're all too susceptible to cynicism. Being charitable is perfectly fair (and ideal) when dealing with people who haven't demonstrated a propensity to deceive (or operating with malicious intent).
- yuliyp 9y ago
  How do you "take out" an attacker? They will just create more accounts. The accounts themselves don't have to cluster with each other. And let's say you do find a large set of accounts and ban them. New fake accounts are being constantly created and sold and used.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    That's where various fingerprints (the sort of thing, incidentally, AI/ML should be pretty good at sorting out) should come in to play. Spammers, ultimately, act like spammers, and bots like bots. Unlike legitimate accounts, which typically either a) follow a small number of related accounts or b) are fairly-well-known high-profile accounts (and yes, pseudonymous accounts may be high-profile), bots either need to act within specific networks or be very indiscriminate in whom they follow / link with. And they're tremendously active. Whilst Google+ is not Facebook, Stone Temple Consulting ran an analysis of 500,000 profiles in 2015 to see what posting activity looked like.[1] I'm fairly familiar with the methods used as I'd pioneered most of them on a smaller, 50k sample. Looking at public posts only (not private posts, and not comments), there are roughly 53,000 G+ users posting 100+ times monthly, and 106,000 posting 50+ times monthly. From an independent analysis, I've estimated that Facebook traffic is, very roughly, 10x greater than G+ (as of August, 2015). So you might bump these values up by an order of magnitude to get Facebook-level scales of operation. Twitter is actually far closer to G+ in scale.[2] That is, the search space for bots is roughly 500k - 1m accounts of major active players. And it should be possible, even with only computer-assisted human intervention, to make a pretty good cut through that space. So the problem is not all that intractable. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... STC's Eric Enge credits me on that page. 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
  - oblio 9y ago
    How did we tackle spam?
    - xelxebar 9y ago
      SPF, DKIM and DMARC? I jumped down the rabbit hole and set up my own mail server about a year ago. With postfix configured to look at the above I get zero spam. Looking at logs, I do get lots of connection attempts from random IPs in China and such, but my postfix unilaterally rejects anyone that doesn't have good DNS settings.
DenisM 9y ago
Perhaps they should try shadow-ban-plus. Banned accounts are only visible to, and can see a random subset of users, at random times. If a cluster member looks for other bots he may or may not find them because either he is banned or the target is banned, or both, or there is a glitch, and there is no way to tell.

by colah3 9y ago

flatline 9y ago

I think that you are right, but only in the qualitative sense, not the quantitative. Spam networks have shown us that taking out a few big players - the largest few sub-graphs of the network - can have dramatic effects on spam rates, reducing them by e.g. a factor of 20. I’m confident that Twitter could identify and eliminate a large percentage of the problem overnight. So far they not even acknowledged that there is a problem. O.P. asked for alternative explanations and people are trying to give these companies the benefit of the doubt. There are actually some much less generous explanations, such as that they are knowingly in the pay of forces adversarial to US interests.

18pfsmt 9y ago
My belief is that they are still profiling their spammers, and are not acknowledging anything specific as a sort of 'poker face.' >people are trying to give these companies the benefit of the doubt. I think that's a good thing; we're all too susceptible to cynicism. Being charitable is perfectly fair (and ideal) when dealing with people who haven't demonstrated a propensity to deceive (or operating with malicious intent).
yuliyp 9y ago
How do you "take out" an attacker? They will just create more accounts. The accounts themselves don't have to cluster with each other. And let's say you do find a large set of accounts and ban them. New fake accounts are being constantly created and sold and used.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  That's where various fingerprints (the sort of thing, incidentally, AI/ML should be pretty good at sorting out) should come in to play. Spammers, ultimately, act like spammers, and bots like bots. Unlike legitimate accounts, which typically either a) follow a small number of related accounts or b) are fairly-well-known high-profile accounts (and yes, pseudonymous accounts may be high-profile), bots either need to act within specific networks or be very indiscriminate in whom they follow / link with. And they're tremendously active. Whilst Google+ is not Facebook, Stone Temple Consulting ran an analysis of 500,000 profiles in 2015 to see what posting activity looked like.[1] I'm fairly familiar with the methods used as I'd pioneered most of them on a smaller, 50k sample. Looking at public posts only (not private posts, and not comments), there are roughly 53,000 G+ users posting 100+ times monthly, and 106,000 posting 50+ times monthly. From an independent analysis, I've estimated that Facebook traffic is, very roughly, 10x greater than G+ (as of August, 2015). So you might bump these values up by an order of magnitude to get Facebook-level scales of operation. Twitter is actually far closer to G+ in scale.[2] That is, the search space for bots is roughly 500k - 1m accounts of major active players. And it should be possible, even with only computer-assisted human intervention, to make a pretty good cut through that space. So the problem is not all that intractable. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... STC's Eric Enge credits me on that page. 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
- oblio 9y ago
  How did we tackle spam?
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    SPF, DKIM and DMARC? I jumped down the rabbit hole and set up my own mail server about a year ago. With postfix configured to look at the above I get zero spam. Looking at logs, I do get lots of connection attempts from random IPs in China and such, but my postfix unilaterally rejects anyone that doesn't have good DNS settings.

DenisM 9y ago

Perhaps they should try shadow-ban-plus. Banned accounts are only visible to, and can see a random subset of users, at random times. If a cluster member looks for other bots he may or may not find them because either he is banned or the target is banned, or both, or there is a glitch, and there is no way to tell.