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> Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false. Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that they're actually Ch

> Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false. Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that they're actually Chinese. /s From your first link: "I am one of the very, very few people in the world who has actually fought bots on social media platforms." At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat... uh, let's call it... "coordinated uses of their platforms for user-hostile purposes." For years I have said that they could be doing much, much more, and people just hand-wave the criticism aside with, "but but but it's really HARD." Yeah, I know. But these companies continue to print money like the Fed, year after year. They could be throwing A LOT more manpower and machines at the problem, and it shows. We all feel it. Anyway, it's just nice to see some side channel data that proves my point.

mike_hearn 5y ago
What specific tricks do you think tech firms are missing? At least when I worked on the problem, both machines and manpower were plentiful. At any rate, you seem to be assuming there's a large uncontrolled bot problem. The point of the research quoted above is that there isn't. Unless you're talking about ordinary commercial spam?
- h2odragon 5y ago
  For the longest time "everybody knew" that downloading files from a BBS or the Internet would infect you with digital viruses.. There's still "Antivirus software". If we don't see the hordes of "russian Bots" we must be insane, right?
throwaways885 5y ago
What makes you think this problem isn't being tackled? Every year Twitter and Facebook talk about how they detected and removed XXX million bots from their platform. For example, the spam problem has been rapidly iterated on [1] to little fanfare. The abuse, T&S and security teams at these companies probably cost on the order of hundreds of millions of $, how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? You can't simply throw machines and manpower at a problem. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffic-share-annual/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  > how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? And here I'm struggling to understand how anyone can read my comment and conclude that I'm framing the problem as being "ignored." Silly me.
dcolkitt 5y ago
> At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat Do you have any evidence of this claim or do you just “get” it. This kinda reminds of the rhetorical device where somebody says “you know it, I know it, everybody knows it” without actually citing any proof.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documentary-1202186194/ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documen... This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.

mike_hearn 5y ago

What specific tricks do you think tech firms are missing? At least when I worked on the problem, both machines and manpower were plentiful. At any rate, you seem to be assuming there's a large uncontrolled bot problem. The point of the research quoted above is that there isn't. Unless you're talking about ordinary commercial spam?

h2odragon 5y ago
For the longest time "everybody knew" that downloading files from a BBS or the Internet would infect you with digital viruses.. There's still "Antivirus software". If we don't see the hordes of "russian Bots" we must be insane, right?

throwaways885 5y ago

What makes you think this problem isn't being tackled? Every year Twitter and Facebook talk about how they detected and removed XXX million bots from their platform. For example, the spam problem has been rapidly iterated on [1] to little fanfare. The abuse, T&S and security teams at these companies probably cost on the order of hundreds of millions of $, how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? You can't simply throw machines and manpower at a problem. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffic-share-annual/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> how is that consistent with your framing that the problem is being ignored? And here I'm struggling to understand how anyone can read my comment and conclude that I'm framing the problem as being "ignored." Silly me.

dcolkitt 5y ago

> At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat Do you have any evidence of this claim or do you just “get” it. This kinda reminds of the rhetorical device where somebody says “you know it, I know it, everybody knows it” without actually citing any proof.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documentary-1202186194/ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documen... This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.