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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 astoun

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
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    Twitter cares about its bottom line. If otherwise, they'd have suspended Trump's account for ToS violations long ago.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    That's the problem with companies once they go public, and I'd argue once they accept any kind of investment; the new owners have the company by the balls and expect Results, expect the stock price to rise. Twitter's artificially maintained that stock price by not banning their users, because it seems user quantity and growth are far more important metrics that influence stock price than the quality of users.
nradov 8y ago
I think you're overstating the frequency of fake friend requests on Facebook. I'm fairly active on there and usually receive less than one per week. (It was worse a couple years ago.)
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  It may be a 'type' thing. Every time I look at my neglected Facebook account I have anywhere from 6 to maybe 15 friends requests from accounts which have basically no timeline and a "sexy" picture of a 20 something female. If those accounts do have any friends it seems they are all white males over 50 years of age.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I once tried to give Facebook another go and created an account again. It seems like my email was in the meantime leaked to some gambling spam list because 90% of my friend suggestions were fake profiles from around the world created purely to log into a gambling mobile game and (I assume) farm coins/items/etc. The accounts were obviously fake - they weren’t even trying to hide they were fake, and I actually spent maybe 20 minutes reporting 100 of them, but not only was there an endless supply to replace those I blocked, but the reports didn’t do anything and the accounts were still there.
segmondy 8y ago
As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have been tweeting tons! Meanwhile, I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it. What I've done is to unfollow a good amount of folks to reduce the noise.
- spullara 8y ago
  You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.
  - basscomm 8y ago
    You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.
    - Sommer 8y ago
      There is actually a foolproof way to shut off Liked tweets (and retweets) forever. You can only do it on desktop - but go to Twitter/Settings/Muted Words. In there, make sure "From people you don't follow" is selected along with "Timeline", then individually add the list of common stopwords to your muted words. I listed the ones I use below, you can add more but I've not seen a retweet or liked tweet since doing this. muted: [a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, her, him, his, how, i, in, is, it, its, of, on, one, or, she, that, the, to, was, were, what, where, when, will, with]
      - cpeterso 8y ago
        Clever! But if you have selected "Timeline", aren't you muting both tweets and retweets with your stop words? Twitter's UI makes the "From people you don't follow" option look like it only applies to "Notifications", not "Timeline". Alternately, you can control whether you see what individual people you follow are retweeting with "Turn off retweets": https://twitter.com/following https://twitter.com/following
BadassFractal 8y ago
Instagram has a similar issue as well. It's brain-dead to buy fake followers, have them simulate interaction with your posts to push you higher in the algorithm ranking, and bots are the majority of the user-base from what I can tell. And they have no intention whatsoever of fixing that.
bostik 8y ago
> This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. [Cynic's hat on] And they can only do this now, having shown the ability to turn a profit. Up until now, Twitter has been forced to operate in "growth for its own sake" mode. Investors keep myopically staring at user numbers, confident that there's a way to turn the faucet on, consistently and repeatedly tapping the userbase for pennies per person. The bot accounts don't make them money, so getting rid of them are likely to actually improve the bottom line. But the sad fact is that until recently Twitter have been financially disincentivised from cracking down on fake accounts.
rconti 8y ago
My mother and father have each had 'fake' clone profiles of them created a few times. Occasionally I get friend requests from some random dolled up woman, perhaps once a month. ... that's it. I wonder what causes one person to get a large number of bogus friend requests and others not. I'm guessing it has to do with who your friends are, and how many? I'm around 1000 FB friends +/-, but the vast majority of them have been on Facebook for a VERY long time, so perhaps they're less likely to be friend scam accounts?
slig 8y ago
> 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 possible to block friends requests from anyone except friends of friends.
- orionblastar 8y ago
  Have followers on Facebook and filter your friends requests. That is what I do.
monochromatic 8y ago
We’ll see. Twitter has a history of being overinclusive of conservatives in assessing bot accounts. If this purge is just more of the same, they don’t deserve any congratulations.
JacobJans 8y ago
> 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. It seems to me that the rational reason to stop an ad campaign is because it stopped enough making money. It's not fake clicks that should be stopping you -- it should be a lack of ROI. I wonder how many people spend huge sums of money on Facebook without tracking their return on investment. I seriously think that is the source of many of these complaints about Facebook's ad program. I spend a few thousand a month of Facebook. I have no idea if there are fake clicks or not. But, it's not a metric that seems to matter in my business.
- tolien 8y ago
  While it’s a good point that the “quality” of click should be a proxy (i.e. you care that RoI might be low because of bot visits, not about the bot visits in themselves) rather than an actual measurable, is it not reasonable to assume that if “most clicks are garbage/fake”, they’re not making any money from those and therefore are unlikely to make “enough money”? I guess that assumes similar cost per click and that your definition of “enough” accounts for a sufficiently low conversion rate. On the other hand, Facebook (and their shareholders) probably cares that the PPC is depressed by the fraction of non-converting users.
thinkingemote 8y ago
You may already have a fake friend in your Facebook friend list. I think your account is marked as a target because of it. It's not something most accounts experience.
truthwhisperer 8y ago
No, I believe you are naive. I strongly believe Twitter plays a love / hate game. Twitter loves to brag with the account numbers for marketing purposes but hates negative attention. The same with fake news. Do you really think they don't know? Sure they do know most of it but the more tweets the better. Everyone loves to receive attention, don't they?. IF you get retweeted or liked by an( allegedly) bot it boots your morale and the likelihood increases that you will come back/refresh to boost your feelings of being important. Although it was a bot you found out later. Doesn't care (anymore) because you are in. Twitter runs over a thin, really thin line. Same as Aliexppress or to a (far more) lesser extend some auction platforms with (allegedly) fake or cloned products or products which violates IP. Search for audio books, ip tv, car diagnostics etc. They know, for sure, but need to get attraction by offering goods good to be true. It's a game, Same as twitter ...

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
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  Twitter cares about its bottom line. If otherwise, they'd have suspended Trump's account for ToS violations long ago.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  That's the problem with companies once they go public, and I'd argue once they accept any kind of investment; the new owners have the company by the balls and expect Results, expect the stock price to rise. Twitter's artificially maintained that stock price by not banning their users, because it seems user quantity and growth are far more important metrics that influence stock price than the quality of users.

nradov 8y ago

I think you're overstating the frequency of fake friend requests on Facebook. I'm fairly active on there and usually receive less than one per week. (It was worse a couple years ago.)

ChuckMcM 8y ago
It may be a 'type' thing. Every time I look at my neglected Facebook account I have anywhere from 6 to maybe 15 friends requests from accounts which have basically no timeline and a "sexy" picture of a 20 something female. If those accounts do have any friends it seems they are all white males over 50 years of age.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  I once tried to give Facebook another go and created an account again. It seems like my email was in the meantime leaked to some gambling spam list because 90% of my friend suggestions were fake profiles from around the world created purely to log into a gambling mobile game and (I assume) farm coins/items/etc. The accounts were obviously fake - they weren’t even trying to hide they were fake, and I actually spent maybe 20 minutes reporting 100 of them, but not only was there an endless supply to replace those I blocked, but the reports didn’t do anything and the accounts were still there.

segmondy 8y ago

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have been tweeting tons! Meanwhile, I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it. What I've done is to unfollow a good amount of folks to reduce the noise.

spullara 8y ago
You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.
- basscomm 8y ago
  You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.
  - Sommer 8y ago
    There is actually a foolproof way to shut off Liked tweets (and retweets) forever. You can only do it on desktop - but go to Twitter/Settings/Muted Words. In there, make sure "From people you don't follow" is selected along with "Timeline", then individually add the list of common stopwords to your muted words. I listed the ones I use below, you can add more but I've not seen a retweet or liked tweet since doing this. muted: [a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, her, him, his, how, i, in, is, it, its, of, on, one, or, she, that, the, to, was, were, what, where, when, will, with]
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      Clever! But if you have selected "Timeline", aren't you muting both tweets and retweets with your stop words? Twitter's UI makes the "From people you don't follow" option look like it only applies to "Notifications", not "Timeline". Alternately, you can control whether you see what individual people you follow are retweeting with "Turn off retweets": https://twitter.com/following https://twitter.com/following

BadassFractal 8y ago

Instagram has a similar issue as well. It's brain-dead to buy fake followers, have them simulate interaction with your posts to push you higher in the algorithm ranking, and bots are the majority of the user-base from what I can tell. And they have no intention whatsoever of fixing that.

bostik 8y ago

> This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. [Cynic's hat on] And they can only do this now, having shown the ability to turn a profit. Up until now, Twitter has been forced to operate in "growth for its own sake" mode. Investors keep myopically staring at user numbers, confident that there's a way to turn the faucet on, consistently and repeatedly tapping the userbase for pennies per person. The bot accounts don't make them money, so getting rid of them are likely to actually improve the bottom line. But the sad fact is that until recently Twitter have been financially disincentivised from cracking down on fake accounts.

rconti 8y ago

My mother and father have each had 'fake' clone profiles of them created a few times. Occasionally I get friend requests from some random dolled up woman, perhaps once a month. ... that's it. I wonder what causes one person to get a large number of bogus friend requests and others not. I'm guessing it has to do with who your friends are, and how many? I'm around 1000 FB friends +/-, but the vast majority of them have been on Facebook for a VERY long time, so perhaps they're less likely to be friend scam accounts?

slig 8y ago

> 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 possible to block friends requests from anyone except friends of friends.

orionblastar 8y ago
Have followers on Facebook and filter your friends requests. That is what I do.

monochromatic 8y ago

We’ll see. Twitter has a history of being overinclusive of conservatives in assessing bot accounts. If this purge is just more of the same, they don’t deserve any congratulations.

JacobJans 8y ago

> 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. It seems to me that the rational reason to stop an ad campaign is because it stopped enough making money. It's not fake clicks that should be stopping you -- it should be a lack of ROI. I wonder how many people spend huge sums of money on Facebook without tracking their return on investment. I seriously think that is the source of many of these complaints about Facebook's ad program. I spend a few thousand a month of Facebook. I have no idea if there are fake clicks or not. But, it's not a metric that seems to matter in my business.

tolien 8y ago
While it’s a good point that the “quality” of click should be a proxy (i.e. you care that RoI might be low because of bot visits, not about the bot visits in themselves) rather than an actual measurable, is it not reasonable to assume that if “most clicks are garbage/fake”, they’re not making any money from those and therefore are unlikely to make “enough money”? I guess that assumes similar cost per click and that your definition of “enough” accounts for a sufficiently low conversion rate. On the other hand, Facebook (and their shareholders) probably cares that the PPC is depressed by the fraction of non-converting users.

thinkingemote 8y ago

You may already have a fake friend in your Facebook friend list. I think your account is marked as a target because of it. It's not something most accounts experience.

truthwhisperer 8y ago

No, I believe you are naive. I strongly believe Twitter plays a love / hate game. Twitter loves to brag with the account numbers for marketing purposes but hates negative attention. The same with fake news. Do you really think they don't know? Sure they do know most of it but the more tweets the better. Everyone loves to receive attention, don't they?. IF you get retweeted or liked by an( allegedly) bot it boots your morale and the likelihood increases that you will come back/refresh to boost your feelings of being important. Although it was a bot you found out later. Doesn't care (anymore) because you are in. Twitter runs over a thin, really thin line. Same as Aliexppress or to a (far more) lesser extend some auction platforms with (allegedly) fake or cloned products or products which violates IP. Search for audio books, ip tv, car diagnostics etc. They know, for sure, but need to get attraction by offering goods good to be true. It's a game, Same as twitter ...