12 ms·
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
- tinbad 9y agoIt's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just the right thing to do. [1] https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/957686987229618176 https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/957686987229618176
- fortythirteen 9y agoIt's worse than not being incentivized to remove fake accounts - they are _actively_ incentivized to be selective about which fake accounts they "detect". How many of David Brock's bots have been removed from Twitter?
- hirundo 9y agoThe only practical way to do that is to take a credit card and run a test transaction against it. If Twitter had tried that it would have died in the nest. People wouldn't take the risk for an unknown benefit. A large portion of their current tweeters still wouldn't, or couldn't provide such proof.
- dawnerd 9y agoThey just need to actually open up verification to everyone not just saying they are but in reality keeping the same requirements that are so subjective.
- mehrdadn 9y ago> The only practical way to do that is to take a credit card and run a test transaction against it. Doesn't really work everywhere in the world.
- samfriedman 9y agoAh, to solve the social media bot problem, we must first simply uplift the world to a unified economic system.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoBots will only increase as AI improves, and throwaways are important. They should definitely be honest about their numbers, though.
- Nav_Panel 9y agoIs a brand considered a "real name and real person"?
- will_brown 9y agoYes, at least according to the Supreme Court of The United States.
- metalliqaz 9y agoI don't see why not. A brand is owned by a company. That company has a registered name and real people working the social media accounts.
- scrollaway 9y agoGuess we'll have to get rid of those guys then: * https://twitter.com/ReactJS https://twitter.com/ReactJS * https://twitter.com/postgresql https://twitter.com/postgresql * https://twitter.com/officialcatfact https://twitter.com/officialcatfact
- metalliqaz 9y agoWhy? Same applies.
- scrollaway 9y agoThere is no ReactJS company. There is a company behind ReactJS but that's irrelevant since there's also a company behind those millions of fake users. What about my pet open source projects, shall I shut down their account because they don't have a company backing them?
- scott_s 9y agoI think you're arguing a point that no one upthread made. The proposal was to make sure that a real person was behind the account, in good faith - not necessarily that person's personal account. So your accounts and the ones you linked to upthread are fine. The "good faith" part means that there can't be a hard-and-fast rule for which Twitter accounts are okay. Human judgement will be required to sort out good-faith users (including brands or open source projects) from bad-faith users (paying people to run accounts that just inflate other accounts' numbers).
- nindalf 9y ago> .. FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts What makes you think Facebook isn't prioritizing this? I'm not questioning whether you're right about this, just curious about what made you draw this conclusion.
- aaroninsf 9y agoTake this hearsay as you like. Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle. And then stonewalled and foot dragged efforts to correct this. By the account I got the only incentive for action has been unflattering attention at the national press level. This from someone with a personal relationship with Z. Make of it what you will. The poison is real.
- vkou 9y ago> Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle. Intelligent and reasonable people can disagree - strongly as to the extent of how much of a problem this is, whether or not it is a problem, or whether the cure is worse then the disease. This also has little to do with fake user accounts.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoHonestly, once you become that rich and powerful, I can imagine it's pretty difficult to not live inside a bubble. They probably don't understand how serious some problems are because they're not normal users. Also, it's probably hard to not let it go to your head and think that you always know what's best for the common rabble.
- pythonaut_16 9y agoPropaganda is separate from fake users though. I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news. That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.
- volkk 9y agothere seems to be a twitter discussion happening with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing twitter to get a user's identity if that were to happen for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity?
- yourdonut 9y agoSpeaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.
- jacquesm 9y agoTwitter is full of those porn promoting accounts. Typically this is an account with some female name and a profile pic of a person in a state of undress following lots of popular accounts. Twitter doesn't even take them down if you complain about them. Very annoying.
- scrollaway 9y agoNot just porn. My account with ~150 followers was, out of the blue and within a week, followed by a dozen different "startups". Every single one of them follows tens of thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back. It's pathetic.
- CPLX 9y agoI'm not sure that's quite the same thing. That seems to be an example, at least somewhat, of using the platform as intended. If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.
- kelnos 9y agoI see random accounts occasionally following me, and it's clear that they're just casting a very wide follow net to see who will follow back, presumably to get their readership up. To me, that's spam, no question about it. Even if it's targeted. (Targeted spam is still spam.) I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too much of the platform, but... it is what it is.
- scrollaway 9y ago> It's just the right thing to do. That sounds like a sweeping statement with little forethought when you're talking about a platform that enabled protests in dictatorial regimes. Step back here: Fake users, sold by the thousands to give credibility and a megaphone to whoever shells out money: bad. Identity verification: A solution with many consequences to be weighed before jumping on the bandwagon. And dictatures aside, I have no desire to give Twitter my ID or passport.
- intopieces 9y agoEnabled protests in dictatorial regimes, sure. But let’s not overstate social media’s positive impact: nearly a decade after the Arab Spring, few governments outside of Tunisia look markedly different. The ability of state actors to use social media to spread propaganda should also be considered in our tally of social media impact. The jury is still out on whether they are a net good.
- scrollaway 9y agoThis isn't an argument about whether social media is a net positive. This is about people, and whether Twitter protects its users at risk, or builds a system which just begs for government to request their real names.
- twinkletwinkle 9y agoWould it be possible to do a 1-time verification, and then throw away the data? Twitter needs to see a driver's license or passport once, not keep a scan of it.
- macintux 9y agoThat seems fraught with peril also. Does Twitter do any check of the data? If not, you've probably just dramatically expanded the market for fake IDs. If so, can governments monitor such verification attempts and associate them with new accounts? If you're living under a hostile regime would you trust Twitter with your ID regardless of assertions of confidentiality? And there are many people who lack a driver's license and passport. Are they disenfranchised?
- wambotron 9y agoBut why does it matter to a general user if there are real or fake users behind twitter accounts? It makes no difference to me whether I have fake followers or not, as I'm not going to be forced to see anything they're posting (or not posting). I can just ignore them and follow who I want. It seems like it only matters from an investment stance.
- kelnos 9y agoI care because I get a notification when someone follows me, and I want my notifications to be a source of data with a high SN ratio. I want to notice that a someone has followed me so I can click through and decide if I want to follow back. If it's a bot account, I've just wasted my time, because I never want to follow bots.
- roymurdock 9y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
- sneak 9y agoFalse dichotomy. Spam and impersonation is bad. Anonymity and pseudonymity and tweet interfaces to bots that provide useful services are all hugely beneficial. Twitter’s main strength is its low barrier to entry, for end users and developers alike.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- strgrd 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726214 "Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- staplers 9y agoWhat a profoundly insightful comment thread that is. Thanks for linking.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- code4tee 9y agoWhat’s even worse is that advertisers end up paying a lot of money to advertise to these bots. In an early ad campaign with Twitter we quickly realized a lot of our spend on “engagements” was engagements with bots. We pulled the plug on Twitter spend really quick. This has been a known problem for a while and Twitter has done little to fix it at scale. Given that they make their money on these paid “engagements” there are going to be a lot of people taking a real close look at this. Interesting days for Twitter ahead.
- ActsJuvenile 9y agoTwitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That signal to noise ratio is dismal, and detrimental to the core product experience. Twitter must be forced to maintain this fake high activity to prop up the share price. BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn.
- komali2 9y agoWhat's crazy is that bots are not violating Twitter TOS. I reported a bunch of fake accounts I found and was told they aren't breaking any rules, even ones just posting spammy links.
- petercooper 9y agoWell, yeah. If they're just tweeting and not @ing at other users, they can't really "spam" anyone since only their followers, who choose to see them, will see those messages. Twitter does take a pretty dim view of DM and @reply spam though because it is genuinely annoying and not opt-in.
- Pxtl 9y agoIs follow spam targeted? Because most of my interaction with obvious bots is follow-churn.
- ForrestN 9y agoA lot of Tumblr porn is actually very specifically (and astutely) curated. The few times I've visited, it's actually a much nicer experience than porn websites. If anything, I think Tumblr would be wise to lean into being, among other things, a space for the sharing of erotic content. Maybe there's some spam but it's pretty easy to find your way into non-spam on Tumblr in my experience.
- patorjk 9y agoI'm having trouble understanding the follower visualizations. Does the X axis represent her followers in the order they started following her and the Y axis is the date they (the follower) joined Twitter?
- grangerize 9y agoI don't know if it is only me but I like when the graph changes as you scroll down to give you more insights.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoI tend to soft-block (block and then immediately unblock, it removes them as a follower) most new followers, because most are either brands or fake accounts.
- oblio 9y agoWe’re probably 10-20 years away from the internet and especially instant messaging becoming a public utility. The product itself is immensely useful but so far hasn’t been monetized except by lock in to a bigger platform or by turning the user into a product. We’ve had AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and many others that can be seen in the list of protocols supported by pidgin.im. Now we have Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype, Hangouts and the thing from Apple. Or at least there should be a standard everyone that wants to sell to public institutions should follow for instant messaging.
- forkandwait 9y agoI have completely ignored Twitter since some guy told me about it 10 years ago, and I have not once thought "wow, I wish I had paid more attention to that."
- jashmenn 9y agoJust wait until you learn about Bitcoin
- dredmorbius 9y agoThis isn't a matter of personal-access only: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277524
- jashmenn 9y agoWe have to be careful about botshaming people who have too many fake followers: it's pretty easy to buy your enemy a bunch of fake followers just to discredit them. Fun story, years ago in my office, before buying followers was well known, folks would prank each other by buying fake followers for our co-workers. They'd wake up and be so happy and surprised and then have to spend the weekend manually blocking each one. At the time it seemed pretty harmless, but now it is definitely a threat to someone's credibility.
- orionblastar 9y agoAlso fake SEO stuff like make an illegal web farm copied from your competitor's site and use a spambot to post their URL everywhere so Google penalizes then in web rank. I was on Uncyclopedia when someone did that to get them removed from Google.
- anfilt 9y agoI am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
- anfilt 9y agoNot sure why I got down voted? Honest question? Why is the government and NY times looking into this?
- ddebernardy 9y agoTo name but a few reasons off the bat: 1. Twitter is selling content feeds to TV news networks. With enough bots out there your tweet may very well end up on TV. 2. It counts for SEO. I once met a guy in 2010-ish who was into casino SEO. He was running a network of ~150k FB/Twitter accounts to promote articles that quoted the oddball news outfits that quoted his clients' press releases. 3. Some people actually read what's going on on Twitter. In particular journalists and swaths of opinion leaders. See any late night show, really, for ample Twitter coverage. 4. Some people with tons of followers occasionally retweet garbage memes on Twitter, including racist videos tweeted by white supremacist UK groups that turn out to be fake.
- dredmorbius 9y agoBecause of advertising fraud, because of media manipulation, because of violations of campaign and fraud laws, because of foreign enemy powers influencing internal affairs of the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, and other states. The problem being that even if you yourself don't view or access Twitter, it is influencing, and largely for the worse, the world in which you live.
- bhj 9y agoIf a fake account is using the name and likeness (pun intended?) of a real person (as many are, having harvested them from real accounts) then it becomes the impersonated's problem as well.
- ern 9y agoPerhaps the original article, which this is a follow-up to, could be enlightening: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/so... two young siblings... earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella. But her Twitter account — and her brother’s — are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records. The idea that dubious businesses are possibly skimming money off big brands (or even more disturbingly, possibly with the knowledge of those brands) by using fake followers is interesting, and newsworthy. Add widespread identity theft into the mix, and it’s even more newsworthy.
- grizzles 9y agoI have a (maybe) interesting twitter related anecdote. 5-6 weeks back I went to the twitter website and I was greeted with a login screen. I couldn't remember my password and didn't feel like finding it so I went off to look at other sites. That happened a few times, until I went back and POOF, I am automatically logged back in again. I've never seen a site un-invalidate an auth token before. Cool beans.
- jeffwass 9y agoI had something similarly weird with amazon. I got a new iPhone and on iOS Safari I needed to sign in to all my accounts. Except for some reason Amazon recognised me with one-click enabled. I never used one-click to buy anything before and accidentally bought a kindle book while browsing the site. More strangely, when I went to turn off one-click in my settings I was forced to log in. So I could one-click buy without explicitly authenticating, but needed to authenticate to disable it. Very strange and/or shady. Btw - is there an easy way to cancel an accidental one-click buy? In my case it was a local author I wanted to support anyway, so I’ll keep the purchase. But surprised it’s so easy to accidentally purchase something from the mobile site if you swipe to scroll on the wrong place.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoFYI Kindle purchases can only be made via one-click. I hated when Amazon forced me to enable it to get a copy of Traction.
- Pxtl 9y agoOkay, who puts time on the Y axis of a graph? Honestly.
- shagie 9y agoWe scroll down and that becomes a "animation while scrolling". While its an unusual orientation, it believe it is the right one. Its not a time axis - its "time since the user was created". The graph isn't a "this is how many followers the user had at this point in time" but rather "right now, here are all the followers this user." A point is "the Xth user following had a join date of Y" and thus the X axis is in effect a time axis (though not a linear time axis). From an eye scanning view, the horizontal bands are easier to follow and notice than vertical ones - and that is part of the goal of the graphic (to emphasize those bands).
- lsseckman 9y agothaaaaaaank you
- mlb_hn 9y agoI don't get the justification for labeling the initial block as organic growth, unless they're claiming that only the horizontal stratification is signs of bot activity. The vertical stratification should also be signs of bot activity, and as they point out, many of the supposed bots were in the vertical stratification groups. For those not familiar with the graphs, the graph shows date followed on x and date created on y. Where there's horizontal stratification, NYT noticed it means the follower accounts that all began following the account at the same time were also created around the same time, indicating a strain of bots. However, when there's vertical stratification, there's a shift in the rate at which accounts are following the account. When the vertical stratification is followed by horizontal stratification, it's an indication that both sets are bots - for example, one scenario is that instead of providing a mix of bots created at different time, someone got lazy and just grabbed a list of bots all created at the same time. However, vertical stratification could also just indicate that the person did something good or bad to change the rate of acquiring new followers so it isn't clear cut. That being said, I'm not sure that justifies labeling the initial section which lacks horizontal stratification as organic.
- S_A_P 9y agoIn a somewhat related note. I read the original NY Times article that laid out the case for the fake followers. The combination of good writing, investigative journalism and compelling presentation actually made me feel like they are producing content worth paying for. I am now subscribing to the new york times.
- mike_hearn 9y agoDon't take anything you read in the New York Times about twitter bots too seriously. They do publish articles that look superficially well researched but which are nonsense or actually deceptive: https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... The problem is that some phrases that appear on the surface to have one meaning have been grabbed and redefined by particular political groups, almost used as code words. "Bot" and especially "Russian Twitter Bot" for example isn't used by Twitter or others in the way you'd always expect: https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-video-twitter-engineers-to-ban-a-way-of-talking-through-shadow-banning-algorithms-to-censor-opposing-political-opinions/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-video-t... "Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers," Singh says. "They'll be like guns, God, America, like, and with the American flag and like the cross. Who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot." The idea that Twitter bots can change society in fundamental ways is one that seems to obsess journalists, who all seem to spend half their day on Twitter anyway, but I've yet to see evidence that it's true.
- fabatka 9y agoWhat I don't really understand about this is, why is anybody concerned with fake accounts and followers outside of ad companies? (Disregard now the possible public opinion influencing use of huge fake account networks, I can't even see this argument against bot accounts in this article.) As I see it, both bot account sellers/maintainers and celebrities profit from this, only the ad companies can lose when their business partners realize that they get fake visibility for their money and decide not to give money for this. Of course this would in turn eliminate the sponsorships of accounts and thus the buying of fake followers. So I guess I don't really get why this industry exists in the first place...
- ahamedirshad123 9y agoOne Indian actor threatened to quit twitter, because another actor has more followers than him.