4 ms·

I went bot hunting a few weeks ago and it was incredibly insightful. What’s interesting is you can just drill in deeper and deeper by looking at the followers o

by elamje 6y ago

I went bot hunting a few weeks ago and it was incredibly insightful. What’s interesting is you can just drill in deeper and deeper by looking at the followers of bot accounts, which are very likely bots themselves. Many created in Feb and March 2020 with thousands of tweets already. I had a lot of fun thinking about the heuristics to detect a bot. Some common ones seemed to be they follow a bot, they have inflammatory bio, banner, or profile pictures. Many tweet really polarizing things. Here is a thread I did about it. I actually tagged a suspect account and the troll started commenting in the thread, DMed me, reported random tweets, and a bunch of other stuff. https://twitter.com/elamje/status/1259691257724579841?s=21 https://twitter.com/elamje/status/1259691257724579841?s=21 The first bot seems to launch ad hominem attacks on organic users via retweets with comments saying something terrible about them. When it doesn’t do that, it just retweets other accounts that do the same strategy.

metrokoi 6y ago
>Some common ones seemed to be they follow a bot, they have inflammatory bio, banner, or profile pictures. Many tweet really polarizing things. Perhaps many are real people who get banned often and create new accounts, hence the recent account created dates and inflammatory bio, banner, etc. I often hear about bots and their influence on the internet, but I don't seem to see them that often. Granted, I try not to spend a lot of time on social media, nor do I actively search for them. I suppose I have never seen a clear definition of what makes a bot a bot.
- elamje 6y ago
  Sure. In the thread I elaborate that they typically have already cranked out thousands of tweets. Some seem more innocuous. Some seem to have already gained 50 followers in a month or two. That’s possible, but hard without a viral tweet. Some might be real users.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    You'll probably like the tools from the U of Indiana's social media labs: http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/ http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/
- sp0rk 6y ago
  > I often hear about bots and their influence on the internet, but I don't seem to see them that often. The type of bots that are most concerning are the ones that you would not be able to readily identify as bots.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
I think there is a space for an "ublock origin" type of extension that blocks bots. It would first start with twitter, flagging "likely a bot". Then once it gets good enougth, just hide bot tweets. If it becomes popular enough, you can extend it to reddit, imgur, insta, facebook, etc. This will feed the system with a lot of data, espacially usernames, emails, accounts, and IP, plus a graph of all that, that we can cross reference to detect even more bots. Now for the ultimate goal: hide comments from bots on shopping websites, starting with amazon. It would become a killer product.
- IIAOPSW 6y ago
  Finally a bot that can administer the Turing test.
pjc50 6y ago
For many of these accounts, I'm not sure it actually matters whether the account is a true bot with machine-generated text; a sockpuppet of someone with a lot of accounts; or just someone who spends all their time trolling, insulting and starting fights. No need to get into the Turing test. "8 digits in account name" is such a reliable signal of low quality that I'd be happy to block all such accounts, for example. People talk about "bubbles", but to me it's more like trying to insist that Origami Twitter and Arsonist Twitter share the same space - one is trying to make and the other to destroy, they're not compatible goals. And there's a familiar real-world example of "please remove your fight-starting highly visible identifying markers so we can have a nice time in the same space": pubs with "no football colours" signs.
bogomipz 6y ago
>"I went bot hunting a few weeks ago and it was incredibly insightful." How does one go about "bot hunting"? Are there bot scanners? Is it ML? Genuinely curious. Are there any resources or links on the subject you could recommend?

by elamje 6y ago

metrokoi 6y ago

>Some common ones seemed to be they follow a bot, they have inflammatory bio, banner, or profile pictures. Many tweet really polarizing things. Perhaps many are real people who get banned often and create new accounts, hence the recent account created dates and inflammatory bio, banner, etc. I often hear about bots and their influence on the internet, but I don't seem to see them that often. Granted, I try not to spend a lot of time on social media, nor do I actively search for them. I suppose I have never seen a clear definition of what makes a bot a bot.

elamje 6y ago
Sure. In the thread I elaborate that they typically have already cranked out thousands of tweets. Some seem more innocuous. Some seem to have already gained 50 followers in a month or two. That’s possible, but hard without a viral tweet. Some might be real users.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  You'll probably like the tools from the U of Indiana's social media labs: http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/ http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/
sp0rk 6y ago
> I often hear about bots and their influence on the internet, but I don't seem to see them that often. The type of bots that are most concerning are the ones that you would not be able to readily identify as bots.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

I think there is a space for an "ublock origin" type of extension that blocks bots. It would first start with twitter, flagging "likely a bot". Then once it gets good enougth, just hide bot tweets. If it becomes popular enough, you can extend it to reddit, imgur, insta, facebook, etc. This will feed the system with a lot of data, espacially usernames, emails, accounts, and IP, plus a graph of all that, that we can cross reference to detect even more bots. Now for the ultimate goal: hide comments from bots on shopping websites, starting with amazon. It would become a killer product.

IIAOPSW 6y ago
Finally a bot that can administer the Turing test.

pjc50 6y ago

For many of these accounts, I'm not sure it actually matters whether the account is a true bot with machine-generated text; a sockpuppet of someone with a lot of accounts; or just someone who spends all their time trolling, insulting and starting fights. No need to get into the Turing test. "8 digits in account name" is such a reliable signal of low quality that I'd be happy to block all such accounts, for example. People talk about "bubbles", but to me it's more like trying to insist that Origami Twitter and Arsonist Twitter share the same space - one is trying to make and the other to destroy, they're not compatible goals. And there's a familiar real-world example of "please remove your fight-starting highly visible identifying markers so we can have a nice time in the same space": pubs with "no football colours" signs.

bogomipz 6y ago

>"I went bot hunting a few weeks ago and it was incredibly insightful." How does one go about "bot hunting"? Are there bot scanners? Is it ML? Genuinely curious. Are there any resources or links on the subject you could recommend?