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Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

176 points by nthitz 8y ago

josefresco 8y ago
Odd that they counted in the first place. Maybe this is part of a phased roll out to identify first (refine the models), then take punitive action? The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet) "Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large swath of users. That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi, sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over."
- jf 8y ago
  > The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet) I don't think you're being cynical. They counted in the first place because it helped their _metrics_ – Twitter is in the business of selling advertising and made the decisions they did in service of their advertising metrics.
  - throwaway427 8y ago
    I remember skimming their quarterly report a year or two ago and being shocked that they focused so much on user acquisition as a core KPI given it was clear how goosed those numbers were. I was expecting slightly more complex CLV type numbers but instead they were fawning over a glorified "select count(*) from users".
ceejayoz 8y ago
It'll be fun seeing which accounts lose the most. I expect a lot of whining about it, particularly in the political realm.
- ds0 8y ago
  Instagram is a space where influencers were deeply affected by a purging of bot accounts (although I can't remember the year this occurred). People made posts in droves complaining to Instagram, asking for them back, and in one case a user cried that "those were users I will never get back".
the-pigeon 8y ago
I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it. All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's not exactly a wild thought. [0] https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...
  - andygates 8y ago
    Human logs on ,sees suspension notice, goes through unsuspension process. Bot dies. Those humans are usually very bot-like retweet mills anyway, in my experience. Thou complain'st too much.
    - burfog 8y ago
      Nope. Human logs in, sees Twitter demanding personal information like a phone number or worse, goes away.
aphextron 8y ago
There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.
- Brushfire 8y ago
  They started to do this but then paused all verifications because bots were getting verified.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    I saw one of those Ethereum scambot dopplegangers on a high profile tweet that was verified. Really looked awful and definitely caused more damage since people are trained to trust it.
    - saint_fiasco 8y ago
      Any hacker that manages to get the credentials of any verified user can just change that account's name and picture to that of a famous person for easy impersonation.
      - realusername 8y ago
        Just the fact that you can get a verified account and change the name to anything without the need to get verified again is a massive loophole.
- radiantswirl 8y ago
  Yes. Now that the prestige value of the blue checkmark has already been torpedoed by their various verification fiascos, it makes perfect sense to make the blue checkmark available to everyone because it would also solve a lot of their problems in the advertising department. Right now clicks on Twitter ads are worth very little because most of the clicks come from fake accounts. But imagine how much clients would pay for "verified clicks" -- clicks from verified accounts. IMO they should make their ad sales a tier-based cost-per-click model with clicks from verified accounts selling for higher amounts than clicks from non-verified accounts. If theyre smart they'll open up a third tier above "verified" for the twitter-endorsed superstars which will have prestige value again (now that the blue checkmark has none). Maybe a green checkmark would work. Naturally they could sell an ad click from a green checkmark account for even more than an ad click from a blue-checkmark regular ol' verified account.
jermaustin1 8y ago
As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.
- briandear 8y ago
  We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.
  - gowld 8y ago
    What's wrong with even 99% robot engagement is 1% human engagement pays the bills?
    - sidlls 8y ago
      People don't normally knowingly pay $1 for a penny's worth of value. Think of it like a bucket of apples. If I charge you a price based on 100 real apples and give you a bucket that only has one real apple in it that's basically fraud. Doesn't matter if that one apple is delicious.
      - citrablue 8y ago
        However, since it's auction based, if you were getting real clicks, the cost would be significantly higher than $1. I'm not sure how it's a penny's worth of value, given that the price includes the market's best guess as to the value of the mix of valid/fraudulent traffic.
  - JacobJans 8y ago
    I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500? If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be no reason to stop the ads.
christophclarke 8y ago
Interesting to see social media platforms finally starting to be (somewhat) more accountable to their users. Their motives are a dichotomy. On one hand, their revenue comes from advertisers, so they must be attractive in the "metrics," but by padding the metrics, they lose the users that those metrics are supposed to reflect. It seems that Twitter has finally reached an inflection point where having more engaged users is more important than just having "good numbers." As social media matures, I'm sure we'll see where the advertiser-friendly vs user-friendly line is drawn. Reminiscent of the banner ad boom that initially made great revenue for the sites, but in the end netted negative for the sites because of the users it drove away.
27182818284 8y ago
Good. If you follow any remotely popular people you'll run in to bots. You can see bots spamming replies to people even with just 80,000 followers --less than the million mark.
traskjd 8y ago
Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metrics. Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's part of my dislike of their platform, but they're more afraid of bad metrics than genuinely delighting their customer base. It becomes a negative feedback loop too. We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't. I know twitter gets a bunch of hate for not doing more, but realistically they are actually leading the way. I'm impressed with how they're operating more and more.
- bredren 8y ago
  > Kudos to twitter Kudos? I wouldn't hand over a kudos to twitter. The article triggering this bot ban wave [1] was written by the Times and included behavior analysis that Twitter easily could (and may have) done on its own years ago. Facebook's actions and marketer value has nothing to do with Twitter's own lack of action to prevent infiltration and manipulation of its platform. Twitter's action on stopping spam, bots and hate speech at best can be described as slow. I believe Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said the company hasn't / doesn't do enough. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/so...
  - rtpg 8y ago
    He keeps on saying they don't do enough, the times is able to do this despite not even having access to raw internal data I feel like Twitter as an organization doesn't actually care about the problem, just about their image. Why else would they talk about the hate speech stuff and continuously elevate groups like The Proud Boys through their verification process (that also affects their suggestion algorithms). And we shouldn't forget that many Gamergate people are still active on Twitter and often use their accounts to direct harassment to people on a regular basis! The even more cynical view is that there's a group of employees within Twitter actively protecting these kinds of users
matchbok 8y ago
Crazy that Twitter still sells ads and soooooo many of the accounts are bots. They have an obvious interest in inflating the total numbers. It's a super, super simple problem. If they really cared, they'd eliminate bots entirely. Not that hard.
- mkeyhani 8y ago
  Eliminating all bots is not desirable. Many of them are useful and interesting. Eliminating the bad ones with few false positives is hard.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.
    - jlarocco 8y ago
      I'm surprised to see comments like this on HN. Technically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to tell for sure which accounts are bots and which aren't. How can they tell?
      - freehunter 8y ago
        There are plenty of ways, Javascript is an amazing thing. For instance, anyone running this site can see that I typed this in character-by-character, and even had to hit backspace a few times. Dumping all of the text in at once would be suspicious. Not a clear indicator of a bot, but one indicator at least. I also moved my mouse and just expanded the text box so I could see my thoughts. Not something a bot would normally do. I'm also coming from an IP address that only ever posts to one account, not to multiple. My browser fingerprint only posts to one account. My browser fingerprint shows me on a Macbook using Chrome, and my cookies indicate I have a web browsing history. I upvote. I downvote. I post something, then engage in a follow-up discussion later on. These follow ups are upvoted by other accounts that match all or most of the above criteria. My day job is information security, specifically working with a SIEM to correlate many diverse logs from many diverse systems and figure out what really happened using many pieces of individually benign data. None of these things are themselves indicators of bots, but the more you start to trip these rules, the more bot-like your behavior becomes. Eventually it paints a picture that shows no human could reasonably be behind an account that routinely posts two or more tweets at the same time, never engages in follow-ups, is only followed/liked by other suspicious accounts, and has a user agent of Python 3.7 coming from a source IP on aws.amazon.ru. You show them a captcha and if they fail or bail, you've got 'em.
paulpauper 8y ago
the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible to the naked eye.
- Jach 8y ago
  This sounds like something a bot / Russian troll would say.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't break the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This is a particularly toxic variant of that poison, and it's important not to use it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - Jach 8y ago
      I guess I forgot to add "/s", which I didn't think was against the guidelines (just low value).
- Jach 8y ago
  Non-sarcastic reply since original one was flagged: It's sometimes rare to see people bring up the chance of false positive identification, though two comments did in reply to another downvoted comment. In the replies to popular tweets are a mix of replies from real people, replies from bots, replies from real people behaving in the way a bot does, and replies from mixed accounts where people sometimes tweet themselves and sometimes use a tool to automate tweets. One account I saw just accused others of being bots, their twitter history was filled with such accusations. I'm pretty sure they weren't a bot though based on the other tweets, and I doubt there's a tool just for that... Maybe people need to be accused of being a bot by a non-bot (sarcastically or not) to think about the chance of false positives more often? But it's frustrating to see congratulations as if the hard problem of identifying accounts that need to be banned (with some bad bots being a special subset of that) has been solved.
KasianFranks 8y ago
This has been the elephant in the room for Social since the beginning.
davidf18 8y ago
I for one am very grateful to twitter -- it helps me follow people relevant to my work as well as some fun topics. Tweets have also disrupted MSM which used to have control over what America could see and know, I'm thinking of NY Times, Washington Post, major TV news. As much as one might like/dislike Trump, his twitter feed has allowed him to get a message out without waiting for MSM to filter it.
duxup 8y ago
I wonder if bot sellers will see an increase in sales? and Twitter announces a lot of new users soon.....
draw_down 8y ago
The really great thing about this situation is how crazy people/assholes can just reject whatever they don't like as coming from a "Russian troll bot". Easy cognitive kill switch.
simplecomplex 8y ago
How can an account be fake? An account impersonating someone else? That's very different from an account that exists solely to boost follower counts. What's the problem with people paying to boost their follower count?
- ravenstine 8y ago
  There really isn't, but then again, I don't know why they'd pay at all; it's hilariously easy to get a "following" on Twitter by simply following random people. I never use Twitter, but I once tried just following random people to see what would happen and I had about 200 "followers" within a few days, all from maybe an hour or two total of randomly clicking. Now 200 is peanuts, but imagine if I had kept it up for longer! Hahaha. It's so ridiculous how easily people will just follow each other on Twitter. It means virtually nothing, with or without fake accounts or people paying to boost their count.
lxmorj 8y ago
Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.
- jonathanjaeger 8y ago
  I noticed a TON of Binance related spam when searching for specific ticker symbols (Nasdaq/NYSE stocks, not coins). It's since gone away from what I search, so they're doing something right, but spam is a tough problem.
- zilitor 8y ago
  Finally someone has some perspective on things.
- spookyuser 8y ago
  The problem is so much worse than this now. There are dozens of fake accounts under every one of his tweets and it doesn't even seem like these accounts are trying anymore. Their names are sometimes random strings of letters, and they just change their profile picture to a screenshotted version of Musks. Oh and once you report one of these accounts it can take weeks for Twitter to do anything I also find it so strange that Twitter hasn't done anything to specifically limit these accounts. They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.
  - Strom 8y ago
    > They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist. I'm all for Twitter doing more, especially as they seemingly do nothing at all to combat fake accounts. However I'm sure these spammers could just adjust a few pixels on the profile image and a naive block wouldn't do anything.
tropo 8y ago
These are not bots. I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot. Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people like their privacy. The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively, and twitter will assume you are a bot. The same does not seem to apply if you are on the other side of the political spectrum. I think Twitter is well aware of this, and they consider it an intended result, but they can't just publicly admit it.
- repolfx 8y ago
  That may not be Twitter's fault exactly. Twitter is overrun with left-leaning SJW types and why is the W short for "warrior"? It's because again and again these people use whatever tactics they can get their hands on to defeat their perceived enemies i.e. anyone with conservative views. Most likely there are people on Twitter who make it their mission to report conservative tweeters as spammers, knowing full well that it will cause Twitter to auto-harass them on their behalf. They do it in the hope they can get these accounts shut down and thus "cleanse" Twitter of wrongthink. This sort of behaviour should be easy to stop, but frankly Twitter's spam team was never that good (just check account prices on the black market). Lots of trivial techniques were never implemented by them.
stevebmark 8y ago
if you've invested in twitter, join the class action fraud lawsuit where twitter knew about the 95mil+ fake accounts (conservative estimate), cause it's 101 obvious fake accounts that any idiot could spot, and still projected growth numbers including these accounts, and used those to help raise money. classic silicon valley fraud.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
The reality is, that Twitter could have easily and simply fixed this issue long, long ago. But, to do so they would have to place some power in the hands of the users. They don't want to do this because it means a loss of their control over what you see. We already know that FB experimented with pushing people's mood and views on subjects around; Twitter is not immune to such temptation also. Simply: assign 2 scores to every user, each out of say, 1000 (100 is not enough given Twitter's large userbase). 1 score is a category score, such as "lgbt politics" or even finer-grained than that, easily done by simply reading all of a user's tweets and using Bayesian (or some other classifier) auto-classification. This is a measure of how the user is perceived by others, inside that category. The other score is a combination of per-region or per-country (because in general, people care about the people in their own country or region more), plus number of times a user gets a like or retweet in that same region, etc. Then, simply let people filter based on those 2 scores. If I set score 1 at (cutoff everyone below 900) I will get top tweeters in each subject; if I set score 2 at (cutoff 200) I will let most tweets across the world reach me. etc. etc.
matt4077 8y ago
The comments here are overwhelmingly misunderstanding twitter‘s action: it will not lower their MAU numbers, where these accounts had already been excluded. Twitter is now just following up by also removing spam accounts from individual accounts‘ follower count.

176 points by nthitz 8y ago

Odd that they counted in the first place. Maybe this is part of a phased roll out to identify first (refine the models), then take punitive action? The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet) "Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large swath of users. That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi, sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over."

jf 8y ago
> The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet) I don't think you're being cynical. They counted in the first place because it helped their _metrics_ – Twitter is in the business of selling advertising and made the decisions they did in service of their advertising metrics.
- throwaway427 8y ago
  I remember skimming their quarterly report a year or two ago and being shocked that they focused so much on user acquisition as a core KPI given it was clear how goosed those numbers were. I was expecting slightly more complex CLV type numbers but instead they were fawning over a glorified "select count(*) from users".

ceejayoz 8y ago

It'll be fun seeing which accounts lose the most. I expect a lot of whining about it, particularly in the political realm.

ds0 8y ago
Instagram is a space where influencers were deeply affected by a purging of bot accounts (although I can't remember the year this occurred). People made posts in droves complaining to Instagram, asking for them back, and in one case a user cried that "those were users I will never get back".

the-pigeon 8y ago

I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it. All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's not exactly a wild thought. [0] https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...
- andygates 8y ago
  Human logs on ,sees suspension notice, goes through unsuspension process. Bot dies. Those humans are usually very bot-like retweet mills anyway, in my experience. Thou complain'st too much.
  - burfog 8y ago
    Nope. Human logs in, sees Twitter demanding personal information like a phone number or worse, goes away.

aphextron 8y ago

There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.

Brushfire 8y ago
They started to do this but then paused all verifications because bots were getting verified.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I saw one of those Ethereum scambot dopplegangers on a high profile tweet that was verified. Really looked awful and definitely caused more damage since people are trained to trust it.
  - saint_fiasco 8y ago
    Any hacker that manages to get the credentials of any verified user can just change that account's name and picture to that of a famous person for easy impersonation.
    - realusername 8y ago
      Just the fact that you can get a verified account and change the name to anything without the need to get verified again is a massive loophole.
radiantswirl 8y ago
Yes. Now that the prestige value of the blue checkmark has already been torpedoed by their various verification fiascos, it makes perfect sense to make the blue checkmark available to everyone because it would also solve a lot of their problems in the advertising department. Right now clicks on Twitter ads are worth very little because most of the clicks come from fake accounts. But imagine how much clients would pay for "verified clicks" -- clicks from verified accounts. IMO they should make their ad sales a tier-based cost-per-click model with clicks from verified accounts selling for higher amounts than clicks from non-verified accounts. If theyre smart they'll open up a third tier above "verified" for the twitter-endorsed superstars which will have prestige value again (now that the blue checkmark has none). Maybe a green checkmark would work. Naturally they could sell an ad click from a green checkmark account for even more than an ad click from a blue-checkmark regular ol' verified account.

jermaustin1 8y ago

As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.

briandear 8y ago
We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.
- gowld 8y ago
  What's wrong with even 99% robot engagement is 1% human engagement pays the bills?
  - sidlls 8y ago
    People don't normally knowingly pay $1 for a penny's worth of value. Think of it like a bucket of apples. If I charge you a price based on 100 real apples and give you a bucket that only has one real apple in it that's basically fraud. Doesn't matter if that one apple is delicious.
    - citrablue 8y ago
      However, since it's auction based, if you were getting real clicks, the cost would be significantly higher than $1. I'm not sure how it's a penny's worth of value, given that the price includes the market's best guess as to the value of the mix of valid/fraudulent traffic.
- JacobJans 8y ago
  I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500? If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be no reason to stop the ads.

christophclarke 8y ago

Interesting to see social media platforms finally starting to be (somewhat) more accountable to their users. Their motives are a dichotomy. On one hand, their revenue comes from advertisers, so they must be attractive in the "metrics," but by padding the metrics, they lose the users that those metrics are supposed to reflect. It seems that Twitter has finally reached an inflection point where having more engaged users is more important than just having "good numbers." As social media matures, I'm sure we'll see where the advertiser-friendly vs user-friendly line is drawn. Reminiscent of the banner ad boom that initially made great revenue for the sites, but in the end netted negative for the sites because of the users it drove away.

27182818284 8y ago

Good. If you follow any remotely popular people you'll run in to bots. You can see bots spamming replies to people even with just 80,000 followers --less than the million mark.

traskjd 8y ago

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metrics. Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's part of my dislike of their platform, but they're more afraid of bad metrics than genuinely delighting their customer base. It becomes a negative feedback loop too. We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't. I know twitter gets a bunch of hate for not doing more, but realistically they are actually leading the way. I'm impressed with how they're operating more and more.

bredren 8y ago
> Kudos to twitter Kudos? I wouldn't hand over a kudos to twitter. The article triggering this bot ban wave [1] was written by the Times and included behavior analysis that Twitter easily could (and may have) done on its own years ago. Facebook's actions and marketer value has nothing to do with Twitter's own lack of action to prevent infiltration and manipulation of its platform. Twitter's action on stopping spam, bots and hate speech at best can be described as slow. I believe Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said the company hasn't / doesn't do enough. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/so...
- rtpg 8y ago
  He keeps on saying they don't do enough, the times is able to do this despite not even having access to raw internal data I feel like Twitter as an organization doesn't actually care about the problem, just about their image. Why else would they talk about the hate speech stuff and continuously elevate groups like The Proud Boys through their verification process (that also affects their suggestion algorithms). And we shouldn't forget that many Gamergate people are still active on Twitter and often use their accounts to direct harassment to people on a regular basis! The even more cynical view is that there's a group of employees within Twitter actively protecting these kinds of users

matchbok 8y ago

Crazy that Twitter still sells ads and soooooo many of the accounts are bots. They have an obvious interest in inflating the total numbers. It's a super, super simple problem. If they really cared, they'd eliminate bots entirely. Not that hard.

mkeyhani 8y ago
Eliminating all bots is not desirable. Many of them are useful and interesting. Eliminating the bad ones with few false positives is hard.
- briandear 8y ago
  Bots shouldn’t be allowed to follow people.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    I'm surprised to see comments like this on HN. Technically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to tell for sure which accounts are bots and which aren't. How can they tell?
    - freehunter 8y ago
      There are plenty of ways, Javascript is an amazing thing. For instance, anyone running this site can see that I typed this in character-by-character, and even had to hit backspace a few times. Dumping all of the text in at once would be suspicious. Not a clear indicator of a bot, but one indicator at least. I also moved my mouse and just expanded the text box so I could see my thoughts. Not something a bot would normally do. I'm also coming from an IP address that only ever posts to one account, not to multiple. My browser fingerprint only posts to one account. My browser fingerprint shows me on a Macbook using Chrome, and my cookies indicate I have a web browsing history. I upvote. I downvote. I post something, then engage in a follow-up discussion later on. These follow ups are upvoted by other accounts that match all or most of the above criteria. My day job is information security, specifically working with a SIEM to correlate many diverse logs from many diverse systems and figure out what really happened using many pieces of individually benign data. None of these things are themselves indicators of bots, but the more you start to trip these rules, the more bot-like your behavior becomes. Eventually it paints a picture that shows no human could reasonably be behind an account that routinely posts two or more tweets at the same time, never engages in follow-ups, is only followed/liked by other suspicious accounts, and has a user agent of Python 3.7 coming from a source IP on aws.amazon.ru. You show them a captcha and if they fail or bail, you've got 'em.

paulpauper 8y ago

the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible to the naked eye.

Jach 8y ago
This sounds like something a bot / Russian troll would say.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't break the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This is a particularly toxic variant of that poison, and it's important not to use it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Jach 8y ago
    I guess I forgot to add "/s", which I didn't think was against the guidelines (just low value).
Jach 8y ago
Non-sarcastic reply since original one was flagged: It's sometimes rare to see people bring up the chance of false positive identification, though two comments did in reply to another downvoted comment. In the replies to popular tweets are a mix of replies from real people, replies from bots, replies from real people behaving in the way a bot does, and replies from mixed accounts where people sometimes tweet themselves and sometimes use a tool to automate tweets. One account I saw just accused others of being bots, their twitter history was filled with such accusations. I'm pretty sure they weren't a bot though based on the other tweets, and I doubt there's a tool just for that... Maybe people need to be accused of being a bot by a non-bot (sarcastically or not) to think about the chance of false positives more often? But it's frustrating to see congratulations as if the hard problem of identifying accounts that need to be banned (with some bad bots being a special subset of that) has been solved.

KasianFranks 8y ago

This has been the elephant in the room for Social since the beginning.

davidf18 8y ago

I for one am very grateful to twitter -- it helps me follow people relevant to my work as well as some fun topics. Tweets have also disrupted MSM which used to have control over what America could see and know, I'm thinking of NY Times, Washington Post, major TV news. As much as one might like/dislike Trump, his twitter feed has allowed him to get a message out without waiting for MSM to filter it.

duxup 8y ago

I wonder if bot sellers will see an increase in sales? and Twitter announces a lot of new users soon.....

draw_down 8y ago

The really great thing about this situation is how crazy people/assholes can just reject whatever they don't like as coming from a "Russian troll bot". Easy cognitive kill switch.

simplecomplex 8y ago

How can an account be fake? An account impersonating someone else? That's very different from an account that exists solely to boost follower counts. What's the problem with people paying to boost their follower count?

ravenstine 8y ago
There really isn't, but then again, I don't know why they'd pay at all; it's hilariously easy to get a "following" on Twitter by simply following random people. I never use Twitter, but I once tried just following random people to see what would happen and I had about 200 "followers" within a few days, all from maybe an hour or two total of randomly clicking. Now 200 is peanuts, but imagine if I had kept it up for longer! Hahaha. It's so ridiculous how easily people will just follow each other on Twitter. It means virtually nothing, with or without fake accounts or people paying to boost their count.

lxmorj 8y ago

Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

jonathanjaeger 8y ago
I noticed a TON of Binance related spam when searching for specific ticker symbols (Nasdaq/NYSE stocks, not coins). It's since gone away from what I search, so they're doing something right, but spam is a tough problem.
zilitor 8y ago
Finally someone has some perspective on things.
spookyuser 8y ago
The problem is so much worse than this now. There are dozens of fake accounts under every one of his tweets and it doesn't even seem like these accounts are trying anymore. Their names are sometimes random strings of letters, and they just change their profile picture to a screenshotted version of Musks. Oh and once you report one of these accounts it can take weeks for Twitter to do anything I also find it so strange that Twitter hasn't done anything to specifically limit these accounts. They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.
- Strom 8y ago
  > They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist. I'm all for Twitter doing more, especially as they seemingly do nothing at all to combat fake accounts. However I'm sure these spammers could just adjust a few pixels on the profile image and a naive block wouldn't do anything.

tropo 8y ago

These are not bots. I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot. Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people like their privacy. The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively, and twitter will assume you are a bot. The same does not seem to apply if you are on the other side of the political spectrum. I think Twitter is well aware of this, and they consider it an intended result, but they can't just publicly admit it.

repolfx 8y ago
That may not be Twitter's fault exactly. Twitter is overrun with left-leaning SJW types and why is the W short for "warrior"? It's because again and again these people use whatever tactics they can get their hands on to defeat their perceived enemies i.e. anyone with conservative views. Most likely there are people on Twitter who make it their mission to report conservative tweeters as spammers, knowing full well that it will cause Twitter to auto-harass them on their behalf. They do it in the hope they can get these accounts shut down and thus "cleanse" Twitter of wrongthink. This sort of behaviour should be easy to stop, but frankly Twitter's spam team was never that good (just check account prices on the black market). Lots of trivial techniques were never implemented by them.

stevebmark 8y ago

if you've invested in twitter, join the class action fraud lawsuit where twitter knew about the 95mil+ fake accounts (conservative estimate), cause it's 101 obvious fake accounts that any idiot could spot, and still projected growth numbers including these accounts, and used those to help raise money. classic silicon valley fraud.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

The reality is, that Twitter could have easily and simply fixed this issue long, long ago. But, to do so they would have to place some power in the hands of the users. They don't want to do this because it means a loss of their control over what you see. We already know that FB experimented with pushing people's mood and views on subjects around; Twitter is not immune to such temptation also. Simply: assign 2 scores to every user, each out of say, 1000 (100 is not enough given Twitter's large userbase). 1 score is a category score, such as "lgbt politics" or even finer-grained than that, easily done by simply reading all of a user's tweets and using Bayesian (or some other classifier) auto-classification. This is a measure of how the user is perceived by others, inside that category. The other score is a combination of per-region or per-country (because in general, people care about the people in their own country or region more), plus number of times a user gets a like or retweet in that same region, etc. Then, simply let people filter based on those 2 scores. If I set score 1 at (cutoff everyone below 900) I will get top tweeters in each subject; if I set score 2 at (cutoff 200) I will let most tweets across the world reach me. etc. etc.

matt4077 8y ago

The comments here are overwhelmingly misunderstanding twitter‘s action: it will not lower their MAU numbers, where these accounts had already been excluded. Twitter is now just following up by also removing spam accounts from individual accounts‘ follower count.