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This is humiliating to Twitter. The fact that someone can create a better spam filter without having access to corporate private information (such as user inter
by YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
This is humiliating to Twitter. The fact that someone can create a better spam filter without having access to corporate private information (such as user interaction signals, which are normally incredibly powerful) points to that they simply don't want to kill the spam:
> In fact, the paper's two researchers write that with a machine learning approach they developed themselves, they could identify abusive accounts in far greater volumes and faster than Twitter does—often flagging the accounts months before Twitter spotted and banned them.
- Amezarak 8y agoTwitter's existing spam filter also evidently has a lot of false positives. I created an account many years ago and used it pretty much just to browse around Twitter, follow people, etc., without posting anything. I dropped off for a couple years and when I came back my location had been changed to Russia (???) and the account was suspended. I saw no evidence that the account had been hacked or anything - there was no activity that I wasn't responsible for. My appeal was denied without explanation. I can only assume I was wrapped up in some anti-spam measure. EDIT: To address responses to this, I think it's extremely unlikely the account was hacked. To be clear, there was no account activity of any kind other than the location change. The password was long, complex, and one I did not use anywhere else.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoHow is having your location set to Russia not evidence of a hack?
- higginsc 8y agoYeah, that's a pretty strong signal that your account got used for some nefarious shit.
- Amezarak 8y agoThere was literally no account activity other than this. What 'nefarious shit' could it have been used for, given there were no tweets, likes, retweets, follows, DMs, or anything of that nature? EDIT: I should also add that I have a very strong password which is not reused anywhere, so I doubt very much someone guessed the password.
- eropple 8y agoIt began creating a history for that account based out of Russia. Which would be useful in the future should somebody in--oh, I don't know, Russia--wanted to use that account for nefarious shit.
- Amezarak 8y agoSo, at some point, someone guessed a complex password I used nowhere else, logged into my Twitter account with it, changed the location, and then did....nothing, because they wanted to one day use the account for something. And Twitter somehow figured all this out, determined the account would one day be used for nefarious ends, and suspended the account because...the location changed? Why? Even if the account was hacked (which I see no evidence for), your contention is that what, Twitter suspended my account for logging in from a new IP, but not until after a successful login and profile change? I'm sorry, it seems a whole lot more likely Twitter used some heuristic to assume the account was a bot, set the location as a marker, and suspended it.
- jandrese 8y agoTwitter doesn't need some kind of stupid hack of setting a visibile-to-you field to flag an account. Your account got hacked. This doesn't necessary mean they guessed the password, there are other ways to take over a well aged but apparently abandoned account.
- Amezarak 8y agoYeah, and the bots don't need to set the location to Russia either. In fact, doing so would pretty transparently work against the alleged goals of Russian bot activity on Twitter - if you self-identify as Russian, then you're not posing as an American. I would assume Twitter has separate heuristics for different types of "bots" and flagged it to help make it "clear" to other users that my account was actually a "Russian bot." I don't know. But again, I don't see the point in taking over an account (please name these other ways of taking one over) and then doing absolutely nothing with it except changing the location. If I'm going to take over aged accounts, why wouldn't I do something with it? How did Twitter identify that the account was hacked, then? Why did they deny my appeal? Why didn't they just ask me to change my password?
- Amezarak 8y agoI assumed Twitter did it. Why would someone log into my account and then do absolutely nothing other than set the location?
- ForHackernews 8y agoOf course they don't want to kill the spam! Then they'd have to admit a huge fraction of their user accounts are fake. For all the attention it gets, Twitter is a niche product with many fewer real human users than Instagram or even Snapchat.
- phillipcarter 8y agoBingo. Fake accounts and bots Make Number Go Up And To The Right, so why on earth would they want to stop them?
- simple_phrases 8y agoYep. They told their investors tall tales about engagement and growth, and would have to back track considerably if they were honest about the amount of bots on their service.
- ambulancechaser 8y agoI wouldn't consider it humiliating. And there's a dimension this doesn't talk about: false positives. Twitter has to make an actual decision to ban an account. When they get this wrong, they have unhappy users and I'm sure articles would appear here about the terrible work they are doing. These researchers pay none of those costs about false positives. Perhaps they have a 7% false positive rate and consider that pretty good. That amounts to about 12,000 legitimate users banned.
- adriveatrain 8y agoSome of Twitter's users are more equal than others when it comes to bans. I don't think they are concerned about blowback from false positives from spam accounts. e.g. "Learn to code" was tweeted at me by a sketchy account. I reported it as abusive behavior as part of targeted harassment. Twitter suspended the account within 20 minutes. Journalists if they tweet "learn to code" at you don't stay silent, take a moment to report it. https://t.co/RXgqqV2ptw https://t.co/RXgqqV2ptw — Ben Popken (@bpopken) February 1, 2019
- pacerwpg 8y agoIt could also be that accounts that take part in harassment/harassment adjacent behavior may already have a few strikes against them for similar things.
- untog 8y agoI wouldn't consider that a typical example given that the whole "learn to code" thing was a targeted harassment campaign. Not difficult to imagine that in that timeframe Twitter had prioritised investigating and banning users who were participating in it.
- adriveatrain 8y agoThey didn't extend such protections to schoolchild Nick Sandmann "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper"
- spamizbad 8y agoTwitter has a symbiotic relationship with its spammers: It needs those accounts to drive the metrics their advertisers and shareholders crave.
- PeterCorless 8y agoNo it doesn't. Spam doesn't necessarily generate revenue traffic, and it can drive actual consumers off the platform. This is the same issue as the naive attempts at driving web page hits during the early web. "Look at how many pages people are looking at!" Then people realized that people were going from page to page because they couldn't find their damned answer anywhere. And so now more sophisticated metrics are used: time on page. Customer sat metrics — were people actually happy using your website? While total weekly/monthly active user counts are important what is also important is churn — are people abandoning the platform because of spam, trolls, etc. Who cares if you create a million fake accounts if you lose a half-million real human users?
- spamizbad 8y agoI don’t doubt that it’s bad in the worst possible scenario: where spam accounts are highly visible to real users and cause them to disengage. But in practice what we’ve seen on Twitter are accounts that are largely silo’d off from users, who act to “signal boost” certain tweets and hashtags. Most users never even see these accounts, and will never interact with them directly: but they will see content on their timelines boosted from spammers.
- exogeny 8y agoYou are grossly overestimating the technological competency of the average Wall Street analyst and retail investor.