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I was wondering why labeling bots isn't mandatory, and can't think of a reason not related to Twitter not wanting the moderation headache.
by rebuilder 5y ago
I was wondering why labeling bots isn't mandatory, and can't think of a reason not related to Twitter not wanting the moderation headache.
- timvdalen 5y agoHow does Twitter tell which accounts are bots?
- throwawayay02 5y agoI'm sure they have an API bots can use.
- marcan_42 5y agoThe API doesn't know whether there's a human behind it or not. It's the same API used for third-party clients.
- zodiakzz 5y agoEasily detected by IP ranges.
- cerved 5y agobecause obviously there's no way to obfuscate an IP address /s
- zimpenfish 5y agoIf I'm using my VPN, my Twitter bots will be coming from the same IP range as me using Tweetbot or the Twitter website. Even without the VPN, I occasionally have a bot that posts from a home machine with the same IP range as Tweetbot et al.
- timvdalen 5y agoHow would you differentiate between a human sending a tweet via the API and a bot?
- capableweb 5y agoUser-agents
- hnlmorg 5y ago- User-Agent is an optional HTTP header - RESTful APIs don't even expect a User-Agent - User-Agent is customisable (ie bad bots can trivially use an array of seemingly authentic strings) - Even Google are moving away from using User-Agent for identification.
- hihihihi1234 5y agoPolitics
- Applejinx 5y agoThat does help at times, yes. When politics encompasses propaganda messaging to achieve a specific outcome or condition, it's possible to study the social media output and see when political messages all pop up in a coordinated way. And map out the network, particularly if you can sort out the provenance of key accounts and know where they're coming from, and identify which accounts are most disciplined about amplifying and laundering the messaging. As such, you can indeed spot bots through political agenda :)
- pjc50 5y agoThey can't, but repetitiveness of content and hours of posting are fairly good heuristics.
- optimalsolver 5y agoThose heuristics apply to company twitter accounts controlled by humans.
- sangnoir 5y agoThere are a lot of heuristics Twitter could use to estimate likelihood of bot accounts: 1) Source IP range + number of accounts linked 2) interaction speed (some actions are too fast to be human, or show coordination like tweeting exact same tweet as a different account withing .2 seconds) 3) interaction times in a rolling window (individual humans need sleep, and usually around the same time) 4) IP packet fingerprinting: can flag discrepancies like a client seemingly tweeting from "Twitter for iPhone" but originating from a Linux/*BSD/windows host
- maharajatever 5y agoIsn't it really amazing that no malicious bot author thought about these before...
- sangnoir 5y agoI'm sure they have, but not all of them have the means (and time) to bypass some of the measures, defeating single-source-IP[1] bots and script-kiddies can cut down on the amount of bots. It's an arms-race that I've fought on both sides of: deploying anti-abuse measures and writing a very well-behaved scraper; unfortunately some sites block all scrapers despite their behavior, and you have to figure out how the detection is done empirically and enjoy your short-lived victories while they last. On the defensive side, you continually have to update your detection heuristics, and the short-lived victories. 1. I also have a read-only Twitter archiving bot that doesn't hide its nature (the handle is "${NOUN}bot"). It runs from a single VPS at regular cron intervals. It'd be trivial for Twitter to detect this and make it not worth my while.