7 ms·

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

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.
  - p0rky 8y ago
    BOTS MATTER
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    You could just fudge the numbers a little bit and have the system say "~X human, ~Y bot followers".
pavel_lishin 8y ago
> It's a super, super simple problem. No offense, but that's incredibly easy to say when you're not the one responsible for doing it.
- sp332 8y ago
  It might turn into a game of cat-and-mouse, but Twitter just hasn't been much of a cat so far. Finding large bot networks is pretty easy according to the researchers who do it all the time. https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-demand-the-closing-of-the-channel-of-pigs https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-dema... https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-7b7ec57256ae https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-...
  - mike_hearn 8y ago
    No, it isn't. It's not easy at all. The researchers who keep publishing these papers and the patsies in the media who keep repeating them are not identifying bots, in fact they can't know what their own accuracy is because they don't have any way to force verification of accounts. But it's apparent from reading their work that they're usually just identifying humans. I used to do anti-bot detection and anti-spam work for Google, and have written a takedown of one of these media articles about Twitter bots: https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... The paper I studied was riddled with nonsense, fraudulent claims, claims that didn't match their own data, abuse of logic and statistics and massive political bias. It is typical for this space. This is especially true because real bots (vs the bots that exist in the imagination of political journalists and academics) usually want to sell things. They're quite boring. They aren't engaged in "propaganda". The belief that spammers are spending lots of time and money trying to flood Twitter with political opinions isn't grounded in any sort of reality, and frequently leads to embarrassing claims, like this guy who was pegged as a "Russian bot" but who turned out to be a carpark attendant in Glasgow: https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll-turns-glasgow-security-guard/ https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll... These claims about spambots should be seen in the context of a US political campaign in which the losers seemed to be struggling to understand why their preferred candidate lost. The idea that the population has been bulk brainwashed through Twitter doesn't have any basis in psychology or computer science, but is an attractive way to avoid engaging with policy issues.
wskinner 8y ago
It's not a simple problem. It's a complex economic calculation with at least a few variables where the false positive rate directly impacts the bottom line as well as customer happiness, and the battleground is constantly changing as spammers get more advanced over time.
- matchbok 8y ago
  Force real human verification for real accounts, and then create a bot/computer/AI account for the bots that people actually use. Human verification is a solved problem for the most part.

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.
- p0rky 8y ago
  BOTS MATTER
- thanatropism 8y ago
  You could just fudge the numbers a little bit and have the system say "~X human, ~Y bot followers".

pavel_lishin 8y ago

> It's a super, super simple problem. No offense, but that's incredibly easy to say when you're not the one responsible for doing it.

sp332 8y ago
It might turn into a game of cat-and-mouse, but Twitter just hasn't been much of a cat so far. Finding large bot networks is pretty easy according to the researchers who do it all the time. https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-demand-the-closing-of-the-channel-of-pigs https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-dema... https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-7b7ec57256ae https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-...
- mike_hearn 8y ago
  No, it isn't. It's not easy at all. The researchers who keep publishing these papers and the patsies in the media who keep repeating them are not identifying bots, in fact they can't know what their own accuracy is because they don't have any way to force verification of accounts. But it's apparent from reading their work that they're usually just identifying humans. I used to do anti-bot detection and anti-spam work for Google, and have written a takedown of one of these media articles about Twitter bots: https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... The paper I studied was riddled with nonsense, fraudulent claims, claims that didn't match their own data, abuse of logic and statistics and massive political bias. It is typical for this space. This is especially true because real bots (vs the bots that exist in the imagination of political journalists and academics) usually want to sell things. They're quite boring. They aren't engaged in "propaganda". The belief that spammers are spending lots of time and money trying to flood Twitter with political opinions isn't grounded in any sort of reality, and frequently leads to embarrassing claims, like this guy who was pegged as a "Russian bot" but who turned out to be a carpark attendant in Glasgow: https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll-turns-glasgow-security-guard/ https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll... These claims about spambots should be seen in the context of a US political campaign in which the losers seemed to be struggling to understand why their preferred candidate lost. The idea that the population has been bulk brainwashed through Twitter doesn't have any basis in psychology or computer science, but is an attractive way to avoid engaging with policy issues.

wskinner 8y ago

It's not a simple problem. It's a complex economic calculation with at least a few variables where the false positive rate directly impacts the bottom line as well as customer happiness, and the battleground is constantly changing as spammers get more advanced over time.

matchbok 8y ago
Force real human verification for real accounts, and then create a bot/computer/AI account for the bots that people actually use. Human verification is a solved problem for the most part.