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Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

347 points by CrankyBear 9y ago

tuespetre 9y ago
LOUD NOISES What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?
- dang 9y ago
  No, it's that some article titles use all-caps typography and then HN users copy it. We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.
  - reificator 9y ago
    It's frustrating that the site markup is (almost) correct[1], because IMO the browser is in the wrong here. I think it makes more sense for the browser to copy the text as it is in the markup, because all-caps is a stylistic choice not a content choice. I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy, and that makes sense. But I maintain that the same article with different stylesheets should produce the same text content on the page for the user to copy. [1]: The markup is in something approaching title case, except that words like `with` are also capitalized. Then the element is using `text-transform: uppercase`.
    - smsm42 9y ago
      > I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy This is almost never the case for headers and such. New York Times or CNN have fancy logos/headlines, but we don't want to reproduce them each time we refer to the company or specific article - we just want the content. text-transform is a great way to achieve presentation need (bold headlines) without messing up content. Copying - excepting cases of visual copying, e.g. screenshot - should always have an option of content-only copying.
  - downvote_shit 9y ago
    Meanwhile, the downvotes are bullshit downvotes. Got a fix for that?
dang 9y ago
A related discussion from a couple days ago is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599802.
obblekk 9y ago
This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
- johnc1231 9y ago
  I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.
    - seviu 9y ago
      I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        > Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar. Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.
  - CM30 9y ago
    I suspect their big problem is more that their site is too big for the moderation staff they have at the moment. Identifying bots is easy for people sure, but it's hard to automate with AI and hiring people to proactively hunt out and shut down bots is expensive. Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.
carlchenet 9y ago
A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Maybe even use your hacker powers to spin up a Mastodon instance of your own so your friends have somewhere to go where they know the person running it.
- itomato 9y ago
  How is that anything but abandonment?
  - gaius 9y ago
    You say that like Twitter declaring bankruptcy would be a bad thing
- westurner 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?
  - rhizome 9y ago
    I have no opinion on its ability to replace Twitter, but the federated nature of Mastodon means that an instance can disconnect from the instances that are hosting spam accounts, much the same as many instances have disconnected from servers that host racist and alt-right communities and accounts.
  - r3bl 9y ago
    It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon. There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce. Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues. It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.
kzrdude 9y ago
> (“jakten” means “hunt” in Norwegian) I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish. Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.
- stochastic_monk 9y ago
  It’s also related to Jagd, hunt in German. Depending on your taste in references, you can think of Jagermeister or Liszt’s Wilde Jagd.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  Is it just a coincidence that jakten means both hunt and yacht in Norge? (I think I unpicked that chain correctly) Also, now I come to think about it, it is a bit embarrassing that we (en) pronounce yacht as "yot". I look forward to reading a future man page describing yacht as an archaic form of the correct usage. The man page for the ls command used to describe colour as an archaic term for the "modern" form - color!
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Wiktionary says that yacht stems from the Dutch word for a hunting ship (one you use to pursue other ships), so various Germanic languages having similar or identical pronunciations for the words for yacht and hunt is no coincidence. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yacht#English https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yacht#English
- lokedhs 9y ago
  It's odd that they mentioned Norwegian at all. Nothing wrong with Norwegian of course, but the researchers are Swedish, and "jakten" means "the hunt" in Swedish just like Norwegian.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
downandout 9y ago
The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios." If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.
- abhishekjha 9y ago
  I have an account like that. I just retweet and like stuff sort of like a public bookmarking system. I just go through them when I get enough leisure. I wonder if having a profile photo would help avoiding false positives.
- stuartd 9y ago
  Well, they're obviously not the only criteria, as the text you mention was immediately preceded by "Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts... "
  - downandout 9y ago
    There are many adult actresses, camgirls, etc. on Twitter that are trying to build a following that would still meet this criteria. Not all of them are bots.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      Personally, I don't care whether it's a bot, only that it's spam.
- jeffwass 9y ago
  I’m a total Twitter n00b. But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b. I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)
jtokoph 9y ago
Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?
- itomato 9y ago
  As a system, Twitter is easy to "game", if your goal is to spread information. It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets. There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats. Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts. Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.
- hellbanner 9y ago
  Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw
  - sandov 9y ago
    "Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"
    - twblalock 9y ago
      Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.
      - sandov 9y ago
        Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.
orbitingpluto 9y ago
The obvious answer is to restrict some API usage, specifically posting, to verified accounts. This obviously conflicts with Twitter's incentive to maximize their profit and brand. So the next obvious solutions are token measures. edit: And apparently to downvote anyone who calls them out.
lorenzhs 9y ago
I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f31e67c https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, but it worked for weeks without Twitter doing anything.
- 1337biz 9y ago
  Are you aware that many ICOs give free torkens to people who share a specific tweet or tweet a specific url?
  - donarb 9y ago
    I would say that conversations that need an incentive to retweet are worthless.
  - lazugod 9y ago
    Is this a reason to not block them?
    - ianai 9y ago
      Sounds like a great reason to block them. Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)
      - beedogs 9y ago
        I'd be happy with that if we also got rid of Facebook and Reddit.
        Cyph0n 9y ago
        What's wrong with Reddit? If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks. But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN... Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.
tracker1 9y ago
I frankly don't use twitter much anyway... I mostly post things that I like, and in the end use my own account to re-find stuff I posted later... it's a bad bookmark manager is how I use it, but at least then other people might find it useful to.
thinkloop 9y ago
> finding these accounts is pretty easy, he used advanced google search and google reverse image search All Twitter has to do is develop the most intelligent software ever created and make sure it keeps inching towards generalized AI over time.
- chrisweekly 9y ago
  FWIW I read gp as "_use_ Google", not "_be_ Google".
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    That's why the piece is cute, it presents some personal fiddling as a possible solution. Twitter can't simply use a competitor's technology at scale, and if they did they would be opening a massive risk vector to their core business. The only takeaway is that Twitter has to replicate the most intelligent "ai" in the world.
nsaaass 9y ago
Hypocritical news from twitter.
goerz 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand the point. So they identify bots. Then what? How can one get rid of these accounts?
- lokedhs 9y ago
  They report them. And then nothing happens because its in the interest of Twitter's business to not do anything about it. To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users. I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.
aphextron 9y ago
This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.
- retox 9y ago
  I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.
  - AaronFriel 9y ago
    That escalated quickly. Are you sure if Israel wanted to pin an extra-legal assassination on you, they couldn't do so already?
    - nkantar 9y ago
      I don't think it's about them wanting to explicitly target someone, but about one's odds of being randomly implicated increasing with every leak.
  - scottmf 9y ago
    Perfectly sane reason for not signing up with Twitter.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - JonasJSchreiber 9y ago
      I want to downvote the person you replied to and upvote your comment. HN apparently doesn't work like that so I'll stick with a single upvote :)
extweep 9y ago
In the early days of twitter, Trust&Safety was considered the second-lowest team on the totem pole of engineering career advancement possibilities (sorry Internal Tools aka Developer Productivity). I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations. Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.
nkg 9y ago
Hey I run a bot and people love it. It adds value and regularlt triggers conversation. All bots are not about porn and mixtapes!
- dmix 9y ago
  This whole bot thing is turning into a classic hysteria. I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'. There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1]. There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating. The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media). [1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
- makomk 9y ago
  What gets me is that most news organisations are probably heavy Twitter bot users themselves.
fabianhjr 9y ago
I just hope something similar to a follow graph/follow range comes up as a solution. It gives _way_ more control to individuals to limit the reach of bad actors. For example: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-graph https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...
YTGRK 9y ago
https://youtu.be/YxnsCkAoXOI https://youtu.be/YxnsCkAoXOI
staticelf 9y ago
I tried to start a twitter account, a few minutes later I got blocked: https://imgur.com/suSH1Qn https://imgur.com/suSH1Qn I didn't tweet anything, just followed some people I found interesting. I don't want to verify my phone number. Fuck you twitter.
- nasredin 9y ago
  I haven't been able to create a Twitter account for over a year now. Home IP. (Not giving Twitter my phone number) I think it's deliberate b/c bots seem to be exempt from this phone number requirement.
  - staticelf 9y ago
    Yeah exactly, is registering an account really automated behavior? It's so obvious they just want my phone number and they are never getting it. Twitter is dying anyway, at least that is the feeling I have about the website.
Aissen 9y ago
As I told @fs0c131y (cited in the article), they're very easy to find. My bot found many of them without even looking: https://anisse.astier.eu/what-do-you-find-when-you-search-twitter-for-hashes.html https://anisse.astier.eu/what-do-you-find-when-you-search-tw...
jordan801 9y ago
Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have already engineered. I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.) It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.

347 points by CrankyBear 9y ago

LOUD NOISES What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?

dang 9y ago
No, it's that some article titles use all-caps typography and then HN users copy it. We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.
- reificator 9y ago
  It's frustrating that the site markup is (almost) correct[1], because IMO the browser is in the wrong here. I think it makes more sense for the browser to copy the text as it is in the markup, because all-caps is a stylistic choice not a content choice. I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy, and that makes sense. But I maintain that the same article with different stylesheets should produce the same text content on the page for the user to copy. [1]: The markup is in something approaching title case, except that words like `with` are also capitalized. Then the element is using `text-transform: uppercase`.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    > I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy This is almost never the case for headers and such. New York Times or CNN have fancy logos/headlines, but we don't want to reproduce them each time we refer to the company or specific article - we just want the content. text-transform is a great way to achieve presentation need (bold headlines) without messing up content. Copying - excepting cases of visual copying, e.g. screenshot - should always have an option of content-only copying.
- downvote_shit 9y ago
  Meanwhile, the downvotes are bullshit downvotes. Got a fix for that?

dang 9y ago

A related discussion from a couple days ago is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599802.

obblekk 9y ago

This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).

johnc1231 9y ago
I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
- hinkley 9y ago
  Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.
  - seviu 9y ago
    I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      > Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar. Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.
- CM30 9y ago
  I suspect their big problem is more that their site is too big for the moderation staff they have at the moment. Identifying bots is easy for people sure, but it's hard to automate with AI and hiring people to proactively hunt out and shut down bots is expensive. Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.

carlchenet 9y ago

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org

egypturnash 9y ago
Maybe even use your hacker powers to spin up a Mastodon instance of your own so your friends have somewhere to go where they know the person running it.
itomato 9y ago
How is that anything but abandonment?
- gaius 9y ago
  You say that like Twitter declaring bankruptcy would be a bad thing
westurner 9y ago
Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?
- rhizome 9y ago
  I have no opinion on its ability to replace Twitter, but the federated nature of Mastodon means that an instance can disconnect from the instances that are hosting spam accounts, much the same as many instances have disconnected from servers that host racist and alt-right communities and accounts.
- r3bl 9y ago
  It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon. There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce. Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues. It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.

kzrdude 9y ago

> (“jakten” means “hunt” in Norwegian) I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish. Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.

stochastic_monk 9y ago
It’s also related to Jagd, hunt in German. Depending on your taste in references, you can think of Jagermeister or Liszt’s Wilde Jagd.
gerdesj 9y ago
Is it just a coincidence that jakten means both hunt and yacht in Norge? (I think I unpicked that chain correctly) Also, now I come to think about it, it is a bit embarrassing that we (en) pronounce yacht as "yot". I look forward to reading a future man page describing yacht as an archaic form of the correct usage. The man page for the ls command used to describe colour as an archaic term for the "modern" form - color!
- yorwba 9y ago
  Wiktionary says that yacht stems from the Dutch word for a hunting ship (one you use to pursue other ships), so various Germanic languages having similar or identical pronunciations for the words for yacht and hunt is no coincidence. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yacht#English https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yacht#English
lokedhs 9y ago
It's odd that they mentioned Norwegian at all. Nothing wrong with Norwegian of course, but the researchers are Swedish, and "jakten" means "the hunt" in Swedish just like Norwegian.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

downandout 9y ago

The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios." If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.

abhishekjha 9y ago
I have an account like that. I just retweet and like stuff sort of like a public bookmarking system. I just go through them when I get enough leisure. I wonder if having a profile photo would help avoiding false positives.
stuartd 9y ago
Well, they're obviously not the only criteria, as the text you mention was immediately preceded by "Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts... "
- downandout 9y ago
  There are many adult actresses, camgirls, etc. on Twitter that are trying to build a following that would still meet this criteria. Not all of them are bots.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    Personally, I don't care whether it's a bot, only that it's spam.
jeffwass 9y ago
I’m a total Twitter n00b. But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b. I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)

jtokoph 9y ago

Forgive me, as I don't use twitter much, but what is the problem with twitter bots? If I don't follow them, aren't they essentially invisible to me? I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?

itomato 9y ago
As a system, Twitter is easy to "game", if your goal is to spread information. It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets. There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats. Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts. Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.
hellbanner 9y ago
Did you read the article? It's political. "n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida." some of these bots, were not bots btw
- sandov 9y ago
  "Our citizens are too stupid to have a personal opinion and distinguish between a bot and a real person"
  - twblalock 9y ago
    Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.
    - sandov 9y ago
      Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.

orbitingpluto 9y ago

The obvious answer is to restrict some API usage, specifically posting, to verified accounts. This obviously conflicts with Twitter's incentive to maximize their profit and brand. So the next obvious solutions are token measures. edit: And apparently to downvote anyone who calls them out.

lorenzhs 9y ago

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f31e67c https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, but it worked for weeks without Twitter doing anything.

1337biz 9y ago
Are you aware that many ICOs give free torkens to people who share a specific tweet or tweet a specific url?
- donarb 9y ago
  I would say that conversations that need an incentive to retweet are worthless.
- lazugod 9y ago
  Is this a reason to not block them?
  - ianai 9y ago
    Sounds like a great reason to block them. Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)
    - beedogs 9y ago
      I'd be happy with that if we also got rid of Facebook and Reddit.
      - Cyph0n 9y ago
        What's wrong with Reddit? If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks. But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN... Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.

tracker1 9y ago

I frankly don't use twitter much anyway... I mostly post things that I like, and in the end use my own account to re-find stuff I posted later... it's a bad bookmark manager is how I use it, but at least then other people might find it useful to.

thinkloop 9y ago

> finding these accounts is pretty easy, he used advanced google search and google reverse image search All Twitter has to do is develop the most intelligent software ever created and make sure it keeps inching towards generalized AI over time.

chrisweekly 9y ago
FWIW I read gp as "_use_ Google", not "_be_ Google".
- thinkloop 9y ago
  That's why the piece is cute, it presents some personal fiddling as a possible solution. Twitter can't simply use a competitor's technology at scale, and if they did they would be opening a massive risk vector to their core business. The only takeaway is that Twitter has to replicate the most intelligent "ai" in the world.

nsaaass 9y ago

Hypocritical news from twitter.

goerz 9y ago

I'm not sure I understand the point. So they identify bots. Then what? How can one get rid of these accounts?

lokedhs 9y ago
They report them. And then nothing happens because its in the interest of Twitter's business to not do anything about it. To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users. I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.

aphextron 9y ago

This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.

retox 9y ago
I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.
- AaronFriel 9y ago
  That escalated quickly. Are you sure if Israel wanted to pin an extra-legal assassination on you, they couldn't do so already?
  - nkantar 9y ago
    I don't think it's about them wanting to explicitly target someone, but about one's odds of being randomly implicated increasing with every leak.
- scottmf 9y ago
  Perfectly sane reason for not signing up with Twitter.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - JonasJSchreiber 9y ago
    I want to downvote the person you replied to and upvote your comment. HN apparently doesn't work like that so I'll stick with a single upvote :)

extweep 9y ago

In the early days of twitter, Trust&Safety was considered the second-lowest team on the totem pole of engineering career advancement possibilities (sorry Internal Tools aka Developer Productivity). I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations. Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.

nkg 9y ago

Hey I run a bot and people love it. It adds value and regularlt triggers conversation. All bots are not about porn and mixtapes!

dmix 9y ago
This whole bot thing is turning into a classic hysteria. I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'. There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1]. There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating. The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media). [1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
makomk 9y ago
What gets me is that most news organisations are probably heavy Twitter bot users themselves.

fabianhjr 9y ago

I just hope something similar to a follow graph/follow range comes up as a solution. It gives _way_ more control to individuals to limit the reach of bad actors. For example: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-graph https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...

YTGRK 9y ago

https://youtu.be/YxnsCkAoXOI https://youtu.be/YxnsCkAoXOI

staticelf 9y ago

I tried to start a twitter account, a few minutes later I got blocked: https://imgur.com/suSH1Qn https://imgur.com/suSH1Qn I didn't tweet anything, just followed some people I found interesting. I don't want to verify my phone number. Fuck you twitter.

nasredin 9y ago
I haven't been able to create a Twitter account for over a year now. Home IP. (Not giving Twitter my phone number) I think it's deliberate b/c bots seem to be exempt from this phone number requirement.
- staticelf 9y ago
  Yeah exactly, is registering an account really automated behavior? It's so obvious they just want my phone number and they are never getting it. Twitter is dying anyway, at least that is the feeling I have about the website.

Aissen 9y ago

As I told @fs0c131y (cited in the article), they're very easy to find. My bot found many of them without even looking: https://anisse.astier.eu/what-do-you-find-when-you-search-twitter-for-hashes.html https://anisse.astier.eu/what-do-you-find-when-you-search-tw...

jordan801 9y ago

Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have already engineered. I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.) It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.