9 ms·

The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots t

The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.

mmpdev 4y ago
But not every tweet through the api would be bots right? Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?
- varjag 4y ago
  How are you going to tell?
  - pvarangot 4y ago
    They can distribute keys associated to an identity and have humans review the apps or bot purpose and content, but charge for the review.
    - pasquinelli 4y ago
      is there anything stopping me from writing a browser extension to make posts on the site automatically? i did work for a guy on that sort of setup spamming used car dealership ads, and it may have been a hastle keeping it running but we got plenty of ads out.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        nothing other than the fact that if they find you doing this, they'll likely ban your account.
    - nradov 4y ago
      If the private keys are distributed inside an approved client app then any competent hacker can decompile the binary and extract the keys. At that point the keys can be used by bots or other unauthorized apps, and there's no reliable way for the server to distinguish them.
- hinkley 4y ago
  That's going to be tricky too because I could imagine someone offering a service to actors and other public people to help manage their twitter accounts (maybe discourage them from posting stupid shit at 1 am. I'm looking at you, Elon), in which case you wouldn't even have a 1:1 ratio. The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).
- duckmysick 4y ago
  One option would be to ban custom Twitter clients. As a bonus, enforcing official apps opens more possibilities for monetization. Twitter could even release a special app for advertising agencies who manage multiple accounts on behalf of their customers and charge appropriate subscription.
  - Uehreka 4y ago
    As a bonus? Maybe for Twitter, but as a user, I would not care for this at all.
  - dheera 4y ago
    My take is banning custom clients should be deemed an ADA violation. You should be allowed to create your own client for any service you want, that is customized to your input needs.
- scotty79 4y ago
  > Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no? Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care. And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app. I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app. That's horrible for users. Twitter's iOS app is a third-party app they bought because it was so much better than their own at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Yeah, but that was then and this is now. Thinghs kinda settled down since then. The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence. I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.
- schrodinger 4y ago
  Humans are really creative. One potential outcome is a few well known ppl start using a 3rd party client, tell their followers that’s why it says bot, and the badge loses its meaning.
ZainRiz 4y ago
With an open API, you even open up the door to "moderation bots" that autoban users from your timeline if they appear to be bots Hmm...this may turn into "Ban speech from my account that's promoting right/left wing agenda" moderation bots Let the bot wars begin
- potta_coffee 4y ago
  I'm not going to lie, "bot wars" sounds a lot more fun than current Twitter. I want to play.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Those already do kind of exist, I recall scripts existing which can be used to block users from lists, and inevitably those were used for reinforcing echo chambers. On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats. Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.
jonny_eh 4y ago
I tweet using the iPhone app Tweetbot. Would my tweets be marked as a bot?
- redavni 4y ago
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    So you're saying "bot identification" would be an opt-in feature? That would go well.
    - themitigating 4y ago
elorant 4y ago
If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. Why not simulate everything through a headless browser and stay under the radar. Then build a farm of those simulations and you can publish/promote everything you desire pretty much undetectable.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. If you were to build a malicious bot, sure. If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Yeah but the bots that people complain about are the malicious bots that try to pass as humans.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      Those become a lot easier to work with when you differentiate them from good-faith bots. Discord does something similar, although I feel they've gone way too far with policing it.
    - takeda 4y ago
      The idea was about opening the API, and this suggestion was to argument that it makes easier for the malicious bots. So this was suggested to make the API less valuable for that purpose. I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
    - ohmyzee 4y ago
      I think we need to expand our vocabulary a little on this subject. A lot of people seem to think that these "bots" are just limited to "buy crypto today" type posters. What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.
freejazz 4y ago
This is just kicking the can down the next level on the issue. They can't tell which bots are bots so what difference does it make it if the solution isn't to ban them but to just limit them? The problem is identifying the bots.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Without an API, the default "I want to write a bot for Twitter" path forward is to automate the human UI -- to some extent, this makes you look like somebody who is trying to evade bot detection. I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?
VancouverMan 4y ago
I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice. For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently. Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script. Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating. These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.
- dwaltrip 4y ago
  That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
    - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
      > In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
dheera 4y ago
What about people who use the API for accessibility reasons because the official app isn't compatible with their needs?
sbf501 4y ago
When I used twitter a decade ago, I used TweetDeck, which used the API to post to twitter for me. So that would label me as a Bot just because I like a better UX/UI.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  That’s a trivial problem to solve.
  - i_see_things 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 101011 4y ago
    So trivial that nobody has ever solved it at scale. If there's a flow that a human can go through to oauth with an application, then there's a way to bypass that same flow through a bot.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      How is that not a problem for the official interface then?
      - pasquinelli 4y ago
        well, it is. so the problem is the quest to get rid of bots.
    - kshacker 4y ago
      Let me solve it as a technical person. Whether management wants it or not is not my forte. You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter. So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.
reitanqild 4y ago
Telegram does something like this. But it also allows (even encourages) third party clients, which can act on behalf of ordinary users.
mbesto 4y ago
Good example: AwareOps tweets every time a solution goes down: https://twitter.com/awareops https://twitter.com/awareops Is that spamming bot stuff or useful or both? How about the kid who wrote an app that tweets everyone position of a billionaire's airplane location? That's the point. > but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed. What if I do this through Zapier? What about Hootsuite? Who's a BOT and who isn't?
- buzzkill90 4y ago
  How about we just print capital letter the "BOT" on automated accounts? And then just add a optional filter for comments/likes/shares?
NaughtyShiba 4y ago
That’s not the bot issue everyone is talking about. It’s bunch of fake/empty accounts posting/replying something what pushes some fakenews, propoganda, etc. It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th
FormerBandmate 4y ago
Musk hates bots mainly because of all the єɭ๏ภ ๓ยรк wants to give you free money scams. That isn't really caused by the API
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  The 'bots on Twitter' thing is perhaps one of the few things I agree with Musk about. Searching a hashtag like #javascript or #webdev or similar reveals a whole universe of obviously low quality content posting bots getting suspiciously the same number of likes and retweets on every post. Things like "Top 10 Web Languages You Need To Know" and the list is just randomly shuffled with link shorteners everywhere. This stuff is definitely polluting whatever sacred public square Musk seems to think Twitter needs to be. Obviously bots and spam is a monumental problem that transcends Twitter.
MarkSweep 4y ago
They added this a year ago: https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/2021/the-secret-world-of-good-bots https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/202... I have not seen many obvious bot accounts using it, even the “good” ones.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  They should try to detect bots not using the API and ban them. IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.
bumblebritches5 4y ago
anonymousab 4y ago
> the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it. If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  I agree this is what his issue is likely to be. I'd be pretty surprised if those accounts were obviously using the API, too easy to ban them by application.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
half of what I tweet could be done by a bot, that is to say answer to writerslift posts with links to books and articles. the other half could not. I'm currently real, but would I be a bot if I automate my bot half?
DeathArrow 4y ago
>The problem isn't the bots, I would see bots as a major concern if you want to monetize the platform.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
this is brilliant
mschuster91 4y ago
That already exists (see e.g. that celebrity jet tracker) but I've never found out how to get that label.

mmpdev 4y ago

But not every tweet through the api would be bots right? Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?

varjag 4y ago
How are you going to tell?
- pvarangot 4y ago
  They can distribute keys associated to an identity and have humans review the apps or bot purpose and content, but charge for the review.
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    is there anything stopping me from writing a browser extension to make posts on the site automatically? i did work for a guy on that sort of setup spamming used car dealership ads, and it may have been a hastle keeping it running but we got plenty of ads out.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      nothing other than the fact that if they find you doing this, they'll likely ban your account.
  - nradov 4y ago
    If the private keys are distributed inside an approved client app then any competent hacker can decompile the binary and extract the keys. At that point the keys can be used by bots or other unauthorized apps, and there's no reliable way for the server to distinguish them.
hinkley 4y ago
That's going to be tricky too because I could imagine someone offering a service to actors and other public people to help manage their twitter accounts (maybe discourage them from posting stupid shit at 1 am. I'm looking at you, Elon), in which case you wouldn't even have a 1:1 ratio. The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).
duckmysick 4y ago
One option would be to ban custom Twitter clients. As a bonus, enforcing official apps opens more possibilities for monetization. Twitter could even release a special app for advertising agencies who manage multiple accounts on behalf of their customers and charge appropriate subscription.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  As a bonus? Maybe for Twitter, but as a user, I would not care for this at all.
- dheera 4y ago
  My take is banning custom clients should be deemed an ADA violation. You should be allowed to create your own client for any service you want, that is customized to your input needs.
scotty79 4y ago
> Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no? Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care. And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app. I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app. That's horrible for users. Twitter's iOS app is a third-party app they bought because it was so much better than their own at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Yeah, but that was then and this is now. Thinghs kinda settled down since then. The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence. I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.
schrodinger 4y ago
Humans are really creative. One potential outcome is a few well known ppl start using a 3rd party client, tell their followers that’s why it says bot, and the badge loses its meaning.

ZainRiz 4y ago

With an open API, you even open up the door to "moderation bots" that autoban users from your timeline if they appear to be bots Hmm...this may turn into "Ban speech from my account that's promoting right/left wing agenda" moderation bots Let the bot wars begin

potta_coffee 4y ago
I'm not going to lie, "bot wars" sounds a lot more fun than current Twitter. I want to play.
dotnet00 4y ago
Those already do kind of exist, I recall scripts existing which can be used to block users from lists, and inevitably those were used for reinforcing echo chambers. On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats. Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.

jonny_eh 4y ago

I tweet using the iPhone app Tweetbot. Would my tweets be marked as a bot?

redavni 4y ago
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  So you're saying "bot identification" would be an opt-in feature? That would go well.
  - themitigating 4y ago

elorant 4y ago

If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. Why not simulate everything through a headless browser and stay under the radar. Then build a farm of those simulations and you can publish/promote everything you desire pretty much undetectable.

tasuki 4y ago
> If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. If you were to build a malicious bot, sure. If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.
- redox99 4y ago
  Yeah but the bots that people complain about are the malicious bots that try to pass as humans.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Those become a lot easier to work with when you differentiate them from good-faith bots. Discord does something similar, although I feel they've gone way too far with policing it.
  - takeda 4y ago
    The idea was about opening the API, and this suggestion was to argument that it makes easier for the malicious bots. So this was suggested to make the API less valuable for that purpose. I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
  - ohmyzee 4y ago
    I think we need to expand our vocabulary a little on this subject. A lot of people seem to think that these "bots" are just limited to "buy crypto today" type posters. What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.

freejazz 4y ago

This is just kicking the can down the next level on the issue. They can't tell which bots are bots so what difference does it make it if the solution isn't to ban them but to just limit them? The problem is identifying the bots.

bee_rider 4y ago
Without an API, the default "I want to write a bot for Twitter" path forward is to automate the human UI -- to some extent, this makes you look like somebody who is trying to evade bot detection. I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?

VancouverMan 4y ago

I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice. For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently. Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script. Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating. These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.

dwaltrip 4y ago
That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
  - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    > In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.

dheera 4y ago

What about people who use the API for accessibility reasons because the official app isn't compatible with their needs?

sbf501 4y ago

When I used twitter a decade ago, I used TweetDeck, which used the API to post to twitter for me. So that would label me as a Bot just because I like a better UX/UI.

KMnO4 4y ago
That’s a trivial problem to solve.
- i_see_things 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 101011 4y ago
  So trivial that nobody has ever solved it at scale. If there's a flow that a human can go through to oauth with an application, then there's a way to bypass that same flow through a bot.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    How is that not a problem for the official interface then?
    - pasquinelli 4y ago
      well, it is. so the problem is the quest to get rid of bots.
  - kshacker 4y ago
    Let me solve it as a technical person. Whether management wants it or not is not my forte. You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter. So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.

reitanqild 4y ago

Telegram does something like this. But it also allows (even encourages) third party clients, which can act on behalf of ordinary users.

mbesto 4y ago

Good example: AwareOps tweets every time a solution goes down: https://twitter.com/awareops https://twitter.com/awareops Is that spamming bot stuff or useful or both? How about the kid who wrote an app that tweets everyone position of a billionaire's airplane location? That's the point. > but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed. What if I do this through Zapier? What about Hootsuite? Who's a BOT and who isn't?

buzzkill90 4y ago
How about we just print capital letter the "BOT" on automated accounts? And then just add a optional filter for comments/likes/shares?

NaughtyShiba 4y ago

That’s not the bot issue everyone is talking about. It’s bunch of fake/empty accounts posting/replying something what pushes some fakenews, propoganda, etc. It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th

FormerBandmate 4y ago

Musk hates bots mainly because of all the єɭ๏ภ ๓ยรк wants to give you free money scams. That isn't really caused by the API

wildrhythms 4y ago
The 'bots on Twitter' thing is perhaps one of the few things I agree with Musk about. Searching a hashtag like #javascript or #webdev or similar reveals a whole universe of obviously low quality content posting bots getting suspiciously the same number of likes and retweets on every post. Things like "Top 10 Web Languages You Need To Know" and the list is just randomly shuffled with link shorteners everywhere. This stuff is definitely polluting whatever sacred public square Musk seems to think Twitter needs to be. Obviously bots and spam is a monumental problem that transcends Twitter.

MarkSweep 4y ago

They added this a year ago: https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/2021/the-secret-world-of-good-bots https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/202... I have not seen many obvious bot accounts using it, even the “good” ones.

teawrecks 4y ago
They should try to detect bots not using the API and ban them. IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.

bumblebritches5 4y ago

anonymousab 4y ago

> the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it. If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
I agree this is what his issue is likely to be. I'd be pretty surprised if those accounts were obviously using the API, too easy to ban them by application.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

half of what I tweet could be done by a bot, that is to say answer to writerslift posts with links to books and articles. the other half could not. I'm currently real, but would I be a bot if I automate my bot half?

DeathArrow 4y ago

>The problem isn't the bots, I would see bots as a major concern if you want to monetize the platform.

machiaweliczny 4y ago

this is brilliant

mschuster91 4y ago

That already exists (see e.g. that celebrity jet tracker) but I've never found out how to get that label.