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My faith in my own ability to identify twitter bots was upended recently when an account with no followers, following nobody, with no posts, with eight digits a
by thedance 7y ago
My faith in my own ability to identify twitter bots was upended recently when an account with no followers, following nobody, with no posts, with eight digits at the end of its handle, which had liked or retweeted nothing but Trump propaganda since its joining, started replying to me about a very specific local transportation policy topic, in a real way and not a some way that could possibly be automatic. Now I don’t know what is going on at twitter.
- aalleavitch 7y agoThat's just stepping up tactics: most bots aren't engaged with, you hook someone then you use that opportunity to make yourself appear valid. You only need one person doing this for a sea of bots.
- thedance 7y agoSo you think they have bus-rapid-transit enthusiasts in Berkeley taking an hourly rate to legitimize robot accounts?
- aalleavitch 7y agoYeah, honestly, that sounds exactly like a Berkeley student to me.
- thedance 7y agoEven reply guys gotta get paid I guess.
- tropo 7y agoHumans enjoy pretending to be bots. It's a meme. This is a problem for the Turing test. Real humans sometimes want to appear non-human. Also, I've known real humans who were banned as bots. They tended to be people with strongly conservative views. However this is-a-bot property gets determined, it has a political bias.