7 ms·

If it's possible to do this analysis why does twitter not routinely shutdown these networks?

by Jsharm 7y ago

scribu 7y ago
The analysis in this post is only on two rather small hashtags (a very small percentage of the whole of Twitter). It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", particularly the part where the author looks at the graph and notices a weird pattern. That's very hard to do automatically.
- molmalo 7y ago
  This. And also, the cynic in me tells me that closing millions of accounts does not look good in your quarterly report on user base growth/active users.
  - g96alqdm0x 7y ago
    Perhaps, but I think you would agree that "shareholder value" is a relic of the 80s and a poor metric to optimize for.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    They also get political blowback when they do this. There is an inevitable flurry of "Twitter is silencing our voices" posts when they shut down botnets. Congressmen start making statements about it. https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dorsey_twitter.jpg https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dor... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/conservative-bias-google-tech-companies.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Does twitter really deserve the trust though? I remember a lot of people I know complaining about getting locked out of their twitter accounts a year or two ago, with twitter demanding a phone number for them "for security". Then a few days ago it comes out that they were using those phone numbers for advertising purposes. Do they really deserve the benefit of the doubt on this?
- brudgers 7y ago
  Twitter could pay people to do the work.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  > That's very hard to do automatically. When you run a worldwide network that has significant potential for abuse and spreading misinformation I would consider it to be your duty to monitor it and guard against these kinds of things. If it costs too much then maybe you shouldn't be in business or should change your business model so that you can afford to clean up the damage your business is doing to society.
  - jeegsy 7y ago
    The allegation here is that its the government doing it. Do you really think Twitter wants to take on governments?
    - birksherty 7y ago
      Shutting down bots that spread misinformation is not against gov. If they do, it will mean they acknowledge that gov is behind all these.
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        Can you point out what identifies these tweets' content as "misinformation", in a way that's consistently operationalizable among the massive scale of frontline human reviewers that you're expecting? On its face, the content of the tweets is "the Indonesian govt built roads in West Papua", which hardly qualifies as misinformation. The author's analysis that this is more sinister than simply a promotional campaign is, of course, correct: the coopting of the genocide hashtag to promote the government and the use of fake, international-sounding accounts are both skeezy as all hell. But to get to that conclusion, you have a professional journalist doing a level of post-automation analysis that's too complex to operationalize at scale. It requires too much critical thinking and discretion, and throwing a million human reviewers at it will just result in the kind of capricious false positives that are also railed against on HN and elsewhere (perhaps rightfully), with an undoubtedly high amount of false negatives too. There are constant ignorant-layman calls for magical tech moderation that only touches bad targets and never steps on the good little guy, but none of the people making these blithe demands ever stop and think about whether this is possible, beyond "they're rich and smart, they definitely know how to do it".
milofeynman 7y ago
That would affect their user numbers they give investors...
r721 7y ago
Sometimes they do: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/info-ops-disclosure-data-september-2019.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/info-ops-...
- rc_kas 7y ago
  not often enough.
davidw 7y ago
Facebook is similarly pretty bad: https://popular.info/p/the-tiny-alaskan-public-broadcaster-528 https://popular.info/p/the-tiny-alaskan-public-broadcaster-5...
wnmurphy 7y ago
I would guess it's traffic + engagement.
notadoc 7y ago
Do propaganda bots increase user engagement metrics?
spamizbad 7y ago
Twitter shuts them down when they reach the press. Journalists emailing them about botnets will get them shut down faster than actual security researchers filing detailed reports. My theory: botnets that fly under the public's radar allow them to sandbag their engagement stats. Once said botnets become public knowledge, it becomes a liability to advertisers and users who now are going to be worried about spam, so the fear of net loss of engagement spurns them to take action.
folkhack 7y ago
Same reason Facebook bends over backwards to make major figures in politics happy, or companies like Blizzard want to make certain governments happy, etc. It's money. It's always money.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  Can you point to some examples of Facebook bending over backwards to make major figures in politics happy? Something besides the Warren allegations; MSNBC, NBC, ABC, Twitter, YouTube, and many others also ran the ad.
  - JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
    You might be able to consider their hesitation to take action on Trump's Facebook page even though it breaks their ToS and is exactly the thing they are "trying" to fight right now [0]. Idk if that's something you'd consider to qualify as keeping political figures happy, but I think it's right on the cusp of that at least. [0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/9/20906612/trump-campaign-ad-joe-biden-ukraine-facebook https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/9/20906612/t...
  - folkhack 7y ago
    > We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos. We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny. That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political-speech/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political... Also yes, I know they have had this in place since October 2016 with the whole "newsworthiness" thing. To me that panders to any politician who wants to lie to manipulate the public through the surgical approach which is demographics marketing that exists on the FB platform (I'm a marketer - it's an outstanding platform). This is what I mean by "bends over backwards to make major figures in politics happy" - LOTS of politicians have taken advantage of this in their advertising. Anecdotally, I believe I have seen it first hand, and I see it as "kissing politician's butts for more engagement". I think it's wrong - I think they should hold every advertiser to the same standards regardless if it's political or not. I see "newsworthiness" as a cop-out to say "we'll keep it up if we decide to keep it up". It puts FB in a scary position of being the thought police, and I just don't like that. I'm not taking a side - please don't get my HN account deleted.
Anon84 7y ago
More than possible, it's been relatively simple to do for practically a decade. Case in point, here's one of my papers looking at twitter bots from 2011: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewPaper/2847 https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewP... For a recent (last week!) review checkout https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01720 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01720 (by a former colleague)
jammygit 7y ago
On the other hand, my twitter account was banned almost immediately after creating it this year. They said it was for “breach of terms of service” - and they won’t even let me delete the empty account now and declared they won’t respond to my support requests. I think it was my VPN. I just wanted to thank somebody for a helpful tweet
freeflight 7y ago
Because the false positive rates are still rather high as there's no universal and foolproof definition of what behavior reliably tags people as bots.
- ljw1001 7y ago
  just like spam email, and yet hardly any get past Gmail's filters.
  - freeflight 7y ago
    The difference in impact between an email accidentally getting lost in the spam folder, and having your social media account getting banned, can be a rather vast one.
ljw1001 7y ago
Because all those bots look good on the recurring visitor stats and the provocation is good for engagement

If it's possible to do this analysis why does twitter not routinely shutdown these networks?

by Jsharm 7y ago

If it's possible to do this analysis why does twitter not routinely shutdown these networks?

The analysis in this post is only on two rather small hashtags (a very small percentage of the whole of Twitter). It also involves a lot of "eyeballing", particularly the part where the author looks at the graph and notices a weird pattern. That's very hard to do automatically.

molmalo 7y ago
This. And also, the cynic in me tells me that closing millions of accounts does not look good in your quarterly report on user base growth/active users.
- g96alqdm0x 7y ago
  Perhaps, but I think you would agree that "shareholder value" is a relic of the 80s and a poor metric to optimize for.
- jandrese 7y ago
  They also get political blowback when they do this. There is an inevitable flurry of "Twitter is silencing our voices" posts when they shut down botnets. Congressmen start making statements about it. https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dorsey_twitter.jpg https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jack_dor... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmD9bmVMAA9M19.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/conservative-bias-google-tech-companies.jpg https://static.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Does twitter really deserve the trust though? I remember a lot of people I know complaining about getting locked out of their twitter accounts a year or two ago, with twitter demanding a phone number for them "for security". Then a few days ago it comes out that they were using those phone numbers for advertising purposes. Do they really deserve the benefit of the doubt on this?
brudgers 7y ago
Twitter could pay people to do the work.
Nextgrid 7y ago
> That's very hard to do automatically. When you run a worldwide network that has significant potential for abuse and spreading misinformation I would consider it to be your duty to monitor it and guard against these kinds of things. If it costs too much then maybe you shouldn't be in business or should change your business model so that you can afford to clean up the damage your business is doing to society.
- jeegsy 7y ago
  The allegation here is that its the government doing it. Do you really think Twitter wants to take on governments?
  - birksherty 7y ago
    Shutting down bots that spread misinformation is not against gov. If they do, it will mean they acknowledge that gov is behind all these.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Can you point out what identifies these tweets' content as "misinformation", in a way that's consistently operationalizable among the massive scale of frontline human reviewers that you're expecting? On its face, the content of the tweets is "the Indonesian govt built roads in West Papua", which hardly qualifies as misinformation. The author's analysis that this is more sinister than simply a promotional campaign is, of course, correct: the coopting of the genocide hashtag to promote the government and the use of fake, international-sounding accounts are both skeezy as all hell. But to get to that conclusion, you have a professional journalist doing a level of post-automation analysis that's too complex to operationalize at scale. It requires too much critical thinking and discretion, and throwing a million human reviewers at it will just result in the kind of capricious false positives that are also railed against on HN and elsewhere (perhaps rightfully), with an undoubtedly high amount of false negatives too. There are constant ignorant-layman calls for magical tech moderation that only touches bad targets and never steps on the good little guy, but none of the people making these blithe demands ever stop and think about whether this is possible, beyond "they're rich and smart, they definitely know how to do it".

milofeynman 7y ago

That would affect their user numbers they give investors...

r721 7y ago

Sometimes they do: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/info-ops-disclosure-data-september-2019.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/info-ops-...

rc_kas 7y ago
not often enough.

davidw 7y ago

Facebook is similarly pretty bad: https://popular.info/p/the-tiny-alaskan-public-broadcaster-528 https://popular.info/p/the-tiny-alaskan-public-broadcaster-5...

wnmurphy 7y ago

I would guess it's traffic + engagement.

notadoc 7y ago

Do propaganda bots increase user engagement metrics?

spamizbad 7y ago

Twitter shuts them down when they reach the press. Journalists emailing them about botnets will get them shut down faster than actual security researchers filing detailed reports. My theory: botnets that fly under the public's radar allow them to sandbag their engagement stats. Once said botnets become public knowledge, it becomes a liability to advertisers and users who now are going to be worried about spam, so the fear of net loss of engagement spurns them to take action.

folkhack 7y ago

Same reason Facebook bends over backwards to make major figures in politics happy, or companies like Blizzard want to make certain governments happy, etc. It's money. It's always money.

oarabbus_ 7y ago
Can you point to some examples of Facebook bending over backwards to make major figures in politics happy? Something besides the Warren allegations; MSNBC, NBC, ABC, Twitter, YouTube, and many others also ran the ad.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
  You might be able to consider their hesitation to take action on Trump's Facebook page even though it breaks their ToS and is exactly the thing they are "trying" to fight right now [0]. Idk if that's something you'd consider to qualify as keeping political figures happy, but I think it's right on the cusp of that at least. [0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/9/20906612/trump-campaign-ad-joe-biden-ukraine-facebook https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/9/20906612/t...
- folkhack 7y ago
  > We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos. We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny. That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political-speech/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/elections-and-political... Also yes, I know they have had this in place since October 2016 with the whole "newsworthiness" thing. To me that panders to any politician who wants to lie to manipulate the public through the surgical approach which is demographics marketing that exists on the FB platform (I'm a marketer - it's an outstanding platform). This is what I mean by "bends over backwards to make major figures in politics happy" - LOTS of politicians have taken advantage of this in their advertising. Anecdotally, I believe I have seen it first hand, and I see it as "kissing politician's butts for more engagement". I think it's wrong - I think they should hold every advertiser to the same standards regardless if it's political or not. I see "newsworthiness" as a cop-out to say "we'll keep it up if we decide to keep it up". It puts FB in a scary position of being the thought police, and I just don't like that. I'm not taking a side - please don't get my HN account deleted.

Anon84 7y ago

More than possible, it's been relatively simple to do for practically a decade. Case in point, here's one of my papers looking at twitter bots from 2011: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewPaper/2847 https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewP... For a recent (last week!) review checkout https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01720 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01720 (by a former colleague)

jammygit 7y ago

On the other hand, my twitter account was banned almost immediately after creating it this year. They said it was for “breach of terms of service” - and they won’t even let me delete the empty account now and declared they won’t respond to my support requests. I think it was my VPN. I just wanted to thank somebody for a helpful tweet

freeflight 7y ago

Because the false positive rates are still rather high as there's no universal and foolproof definition of what behavior reliably tags people as bots.

ljw1001 7y ago
just like spam email, and yet hardly any get past Gmail's filters.
- freeflight 7y ago
  The difference in impact between an email accidentally getting lost in the spam folder, and having your social media account getting banned, can be a rather vast one.

ljw1001 7y ago

Because all those bots look good on the recurring visitor stats and the provocation is good for engagement