9 ms·

The majority of traffic from X may have been fake during the Super Bowl

255 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

solardev 3y ago
Isn't it usually fake even when the superbowls aren't happening..?
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  I got a fake AI robocall from Roger Goodell telling me the Superbowl was happening a week later, so I missed it!
  - solardev 3y ago
    I got a similar call telling me the Superbowl was today. I watched it, and the 49ers had an amazing victory!! The halftime ads for some crypto thing weren't very good though :(
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      That's because Gavin Newsom called up Roger Goodell in what was a perfect phone call, and demanded: "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, four points, which is one more than we have, because we won the game."
hn8305823 3y ago
[flagged]
- notwhereyouare 3y ago
  I don't think that's the right reason to flag an article
  - kortilla 3y ago
    That’s actually a pretty good reason to flag an article. It’s not much different than any article mentioning politicians. People aren’t able to engage on articles surrounding musk or any of his companies intelligently.
  - hn8305823 3y ago
    Ok, I unflagged
UberFly 3y ago
Does CHEQ publish any kind of public data on this that reports on various sites?
- refulgentis 3y ago
  The absence of specific information regarding the publication of data reports could suggest that the dissemination of detailed reports or analyses to the public might not be within its standard practice or could be subject to certain conditions.
Nyra 3y ago
Tangentially related but I recently signed up for a Twitter account post Elon acquisition and the last step of the process requires you to follow one account to start using the site, the first option is Elon Musk and everything else is random based on your selected interests. Are any numbers on this site not juiced at this point?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Yeah, this is reportedly a measure they put in place after he bought the company because he was unhappy with engagement on his posts. It doesn't exclusively boost him AFAIK. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-engineers-twitter-engagement-1234680113/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-... https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-elon-musk-dril-mrbeast-algorithm-accounts https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-el...
- JohnTHaller 3y ago
  I get his account in my feed daily despite selecting "Not interested" each time.
- travoc 3y ago
  MySpace did it first.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - BandButcher 3y ago
    True, & tom made the first move ;) we didn't have to add him
comeonbro 3y ago
M Y P U S S Y I N B I O I gave Musk a lot of leeway on this for taking over right as open-source LLMs started ~passing the turing test, but that they can't even stop this is eating most of it.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  There's so many weird things about that specific abuse. The frequency...the inability to stop it after 2 months... The weirdest thing is they seem to get some special treatment that renders them invisible, yet, not prevent them from being posted altogether, or have any impact on the account itself. It's not even particularly productive spam. It's like watching someone thumb their noise in front of a steamroller. Makes no sense.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    All of that plus the original intention was to buy twitter and stop the bots.
    - solardev 3y ago
      ...was that really his original intention...
    - pavlov 3y ago
      “Stop the bots” was a made-up rationale when he wanted out of the deal. The original intention was to buy Twitter so Musk would be the most popular man in the world, his comedy would be appreciated by a billion followers soon, and as a nice bonus they’d buy whatever crypto he decided to pump. The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic.
      - solardev 3y ago
        > The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic. You know, a part of me hopes he makes it to Mars in my lifetime and just proceeds to take over the planet, running an alternative society there. Planet Musk: The Reality Show™ would be quite the thing to watch... from 140 million miles away.
labrador 3y ago
Can confirm. I don't have cable so I relied on the "latest" tab in X. Almost all the traffic was for sites purporting to be showing it live, but weren't because they were some sort of scam.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  You get this for Premier League football games too - hundreds of accounts posting "WATCH LIVE!" with hundreds of sketchy URLs. In defence of the current owner, it was like this before he took over and it's not noticeably worse (from my observations - probably is if you do proper analysis, etc.)
  - orwin 3y ago
    I think it is noticeably worse, because some content is now absent (especially cybersec, at least in my timeline). The only use of twitter i have left is following US sports, and i guarantee you it's worse. Also, i hve the distinct impression that women left the platform. I think it was already one of the most masculine coded social media, but now with the rebrand (both logo and new name) i would be surprised if the number of non-activist women on it are really, really low.
    - saltminer 3y ago
      At this point, there's only a few people I care about left on the platform. And now that I think about who I used to follow...this certainly tracks.
lucidone 3y ago
Every day I get new followers on twitter that are sex bots and onlyfans catfishes. Nothing else. Seems like the platform is a wasteland.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real, even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is still up. Original: https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader Fake: https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to see if the profile image is the same!?
  - labrador 3y ago
    I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk doesn't care.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        I suspect that only the true believers are left. There were _so_ many actions and warning signs over the last year I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good/stable place to work unless they really liked Musk.
        3y ago
helf 3y ago
[dead]
metalspot 3y ago
> CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits. The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K. This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.
- porphyra 3y ago
  Yeah the data seems sketchy but then Elon-haters anxious to see X fail will gobble it up as if it were gospel just to satiate their confirmation bias. The truth is probably somewhere in between... there are probably actually a lot of bots on X but not nearly as bad as this report makes it seem.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  >The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K. While I agree that this feels like an ad for CHEQ, their scale would presumably be based on how many ads their partners placed on various platforms. They could be buying far more ads on TikTok than on Instagram for some reason.
- crowcroft 3y ago
  'Ad fraud' and 'bot traffic' tools really don't have any true insight into these walled gardens. None of them are running their own code on anyone's device to track anything, at best they're processing data given to them from a Meta/TikTok/X etc. API that might have a bit more data other people don't have access to. Maybe that uncovers some new insight and some egregious cases of fraud occasionally, but ultimately the big platforms are basically just saying 'trust me bro' and getting rubber stamped by these vendors. I don't doubt X is full of bot traffic, but Meta might just be better at fudging their numbers to CHEQ for all we know.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
He should just sell twitter and focus on real things. This whole saving the town square free speech thing was fun for a bit and now everyone knows twitter was never the town square and free speech was never a problem. Tesla stocks are tumbling because of his bullshit.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I'd imagine that Elon and Twitter would deliberately keep bot numbers in their reports to make it seem like the website is doing better than ever. Can Elon / Twitter straight up lie and share fake or misleading numbers? Would that be illegal and result in any kind of legal action, or are would they be allowed to lie and mislead because they're a private company? It's not like these reports would be audited by any external sources. Asking genuinely if anyone is familiarized with this legal domain.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Being public didn't stop him from lying about Tesla information. This would generally be fraud, whether public or private, but that is extremely under prosecuted.
silisili 3y ago
Anyone who has been on Twitter lately could tell you that. Click any mildly popular thread, and you get about 25% crypto scams, 25% OF, 20% irrelevant clickbait, and maybe 25% at least somewhat relevant replies. The other 5% are also bots complaining that the replies aren't about the post, odd as that sounds.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  I think one limiting factor is the fact that most posts aren't particularly deep or insightful, so the intellectual space from which one can engage on the subject is pretty limited. So most people who engage with content of this sort are just clout chasers trying to get attention or scammers. Is it really surprising that if Elon amplifies some post with a single exclamation mark all of the replies will be completely inane and full of spam? Another factor is account size. You can still find interesting replies in accounts that are relatively small, especially when the author takes time to manually hide spam and scams. But once an account goes beyond a certain size they just become a magnet for nonsense. It's pure quantity over quality. Elon has the biggest number of followers but the quality is abysmal.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Ironically discussions tend to be better in circles where nobody wants to pay for the blue checkmark on principle, because the comments there are still sorted using the old ranking system. But as soon as bluechecks start posting they get shunted to the top regardless of quality, burying all the good replies from non-bluechecks.
    - nothercastle 3y ago
      Where do you find these circles all the comments are spam.
- lemoncookiechip 3y ago
  The blue checkmark is the main cause of this, or rather, the fact that it automatically boosts your comment over those who don't have one. This led to the current engagement farming meta, where none of the comments are about the OP itself (save for smaller accounts and even then.) EDIT: Sometimes I find myself holding the spacebar, doom scrolling to reach the "peasant" comments, because at least they're actual comments.
DonHopkins 3y ago
This is just a lead-up to one hell of an election.
NetOpWibby 3y ago
LOL LMAO! Remember when Musk said there weren't any bots on his platform? He had the bot problem under control?
Alupis 3y ago
I would really like to know more about how they determine what is "fake" versus real. > CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich's company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client's page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website. This does not seem anywhere near foolproof, and seems like it would have a small sample pool to analyze. It seems to me the overwhelming majority of bots are not following links... meaning they are sampling only a specific type of bot behavior and attempting to extrapolate that to the entire platform. That seems fallible. Additionally, the compared sites are not... comparable. It's not fair to compare twitter with Mashable, TikTok, Instagram, or even Facebook. The type of community is different, and the type of content is different. Twitter is much more of a broadcasting/informational platform (ie. shouting into the wind) and therefore lends itself to bot accounts a lot more than your average Facebook account, for instance. This is why for years the Twitter API (aka. "Firehose") has been such a contentious issue and other social platforms like Facebook's have not.
happytiger 3y ago
> The majority of traffic from and on x may be fake. There I fixed it. The question should also be, “how much of the general Internet is similarly faked?” How could anyone ever tell if it wasn’t badly done?
arbuge 3y ago
We advertise on X and have done so for many years now (well, it was Twitter for most of that period). Indeed we can confirm that we saw a big change happen around a couple of months ago or so - sometime towards the end of last year. Our ads started getting literally orders of magnitude more traffic - we reduced the bids by a factor of 30x (no typo - that's thirty) and were surprised to see them taken up to the budget limit completely... we ended up spending a minor fraction of what we spent before for a lot more traffic. So far, so good, right? Not so much. None of the traffic converted anymore. All useless. I can't remember the last actual conversion from X our conversion tracking software recorded at this point... weeks ago for sure. Formerly we got several a day.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  How long with no conversions do you typically continue ad spend?
  - garciasn 3y ago
    Depends on the type of ad and its intent. But, no one should be advertising on Twitter for any reason anymore. It’s not brand safe and it’s always been absolutely trash; but, now it’s even worse. Shift your budget to any other meaningful platform within the channel; you’ll be glad you did.
    - oefrha 3y ago
      Political ads should do just fine. I was in Hong Kong for two weeks late last year and every time I opened Twitter there I saw a promoted post for a voachinese.com article (something something China bad). It’s always VOA Chinese even though my language is clearly English, and my account is completely passive, never tweeted anything, liked anything or followed anyone, most of my visits are HN referrals about something tech related. It was quite surreal, like they bought the entire ad space of the region or something.
  - arbuge 3y ago
    It’s not a bad idea to keep stuff running on a shoestring budget to keep an eye on things, in case things change again.
nomilk 3y ago
What motivates someone create a bot to click on ads? Is that to waste competitor's ad spend? Or some other purpose?
- smadge 3y ago
  Maybe > Ads revenue sharing lets you share revenue from verified user's organic impressions of ads displayed in replies to content you post on X. Accounts can post content, and have bots click on ads shown in the replies, and gain a portion of the ad revenue.
  - nomilk 3y ago
    In that case there's a huge incentive to create bots to click on ads! It could be easily solved if twitter can distinguish between bot and human clicks, and only share revenue on the latter.
nomadiccoder 3y ago
> It's a small portion of the relevant data, and it's not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend. that seems like an odd statement to make in the article
brentm 3y ago
Probably bots operated by the X revenue generation skunkworks.
nojvek 3y ago
Xitter is perhaps Elon’s Xittest company so far. I was a daily user. With so many bots and ads, I only visit when I see an interesting link on the wide web. I still find to hard to digest Elon blew ~40 billion on it and made it worse.
theshrike79 3y ago
Wasn't Musk supposed to end all the bots? How are they getting around the limits? Even Nitter is packing its bags because the site and API are so restrictive. And I had to remove twitter title fetching from my IRC bot ages ago because the API shut down and would've been too expensive for a hobby project. It literally didn't do anything except use the API to grab info about a url to a tweet.
- naet 3y ago
  I honestly think removing API access was done to prevent researchers from getting accurate data out of Twitter, making Twitter themselves the only source of information around platform usage. Spam has obviously not been reduced in any way by the API changes. I think they already had an easy time tracking API account misuse and knew it wouldn't reduce spam in any meaningful way. Maybe a bit of a conspiracy theory. Also possible Mr Musk just decided API access = spam and shut it down on a whim. Definitely not easy having a boss who makes snap decisions like that and doesn't tolerate any pushback or dissent.

255 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

Isn't it usually fake even when the superbowls aren't happening..?

DonHopkins 3y ago
I got a fake AI robocall from Roger Goodell telling me the Superbowl was happening a week later, so I missed it!
- solardev 3y ago
  I got a similar call telling me the Superbowl was today. I watched it, and the 49ers had an amazing victory!! The halftime ads for some crypto thing weren't very good though :(
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    That's because Gavin Newsom called up Roger Goodell in what was a perfect phone call, and demanded: "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, four points, which is one more than we have, because we won the game."

hn8305823 3y ago

[flagged]

notwhereyouare 3y ago
I don't think that's the right reason to flag an article
- kortilla 3y ago
  That’s actually a pretty good reason to flag an article. It’s not much different than any article mentioning politicians. People aren’t able to engage on articles surrounding musk or any of his companies intelligently.
- hn8305823 3y ago
  Ok, I unflagged

UberFly 3y ago

Does CHEQ publish any kind of public data on this that reports on various sites?

refulgentis 3y ago
The absence of specific information regarding the publication of data reports could suggest that the dissemination of detailed reports or analyses to the public might not be within its standard practice or could be subject to certain conditions.

Nyra 3y ago

Tangentially related but I recently signed up for a Twitter account post Elon acquisition and the last step of the process requires you to follow one account to start using the site, the first option is Elon Musk and everything else is random based on your selected interests. Are any numbers on this site not juiced at this point?

kevingadd 3y ago
Yeah, this is reportedly a measure they put in place after he bought the company because he was unhappy with engagement on his posts. It doesn't exclusively boost him AFAIK. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-engineers-twitter-engagement-1234680113/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-... https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-elon-musk-dril-mrbeast-algorithm-accounts https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-el...
JohnTHaller 3y ago
I get his account in my feed daily despite selecting "Not interested" each time.
travoc 3y ago
MySpace did it first.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- BandButcher 3y ago
  True, & tom made the first move ;) we didn't have to add him

comeonbro 3y ago

M Y P U S S Y I N B I O I gave Musk a lot of leeway on this for taking over right as open-source LLMs started ~passing the turing test, but that they can't even stop this is eating most of it.

refulgentis 3y ago
There's so many weird things about that specific abuse. The frequency...the inability to stop it after 2 months... The weirdest thing is they seem to get some special treatment that renders them invisible, yet, not prevent them from being posted altogether, or have any impact on the account itself. It's not even particularly productive spam. It's like watching someone thumb their noise in front of a steamroller. Makes no sense.
- detourdog 3y ago
  All of that plus the original intention was to buy twitter and stop the bots.
  - solardev 3y ago
    ...was that really his original intention...
  - pavlov 3y ago
    “Stop the bots” was a made-up rationale when he wanted out of the deal. The original intention was to buy Twitter so Musk would be the most popular man in the world, his comedy would be appreciated by a billion followers soon, and as a nice bonus they’d buy whatever crypto he decided to pump. The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic.
    - solardev 3y ago
      > The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic. You know, a part of me hopes he makes it to Mars in my lifetime and just proceeds to take over the planet, running an alternative society there. Planet Musk: The Reality Show™ would be quite the thing to watch... from 140 million miles away.

labrador 3y ago

Can confirm. I don't have cable so I relied on the "latest" tab in X. Almost all the traffic was for sites purporting to be showing it live, but weren't because they were some sort of scam.

zimpenfish 3y ago
You get this for Premier League football games too - hundreds of accounts posting "WATCH LIVE!" with hundreds of sketchy URLs. In defence of the current owner, it was like this before he took over and it's not noticeably worse (from my observations - probably is if you do proper analysis, etc.)
- orwin 3y ago
  I think it is noticeably worse, because some content is now absent (especially cybersec, at least in my timeline). The only use of twitter i have left is following US sports, and i guarantee you it's worse. Also, i hve the distinct impression that women left the platform. I think it was already one of the most masculine coded social media, but now with the rebrand (both logo and new name) i would be surprised if the number of non-activist women on it are really, really low.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    At this point, there's only a few people I care about left on the platform. And now that I think about who I used to follow...this certainly tracks.

lucidone 3y ago

Every day I get new followers on twitter that are sex bots and onlyfans catfishes. Nothing else. Seems like the platform is a wasteland.

latchkey 3y ago
I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real, even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is still up. Original: https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader Fake: https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to see if the profile image is the same!?
- labrador 3y ago
  I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk doesn't care.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      I suspect that only the true believers are left. There were _so_ many actions and warning signs over the last year I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good/stable place to work unless they really liked Musk.
      - 3y ago

helf 3y ago

[dead]

metalspot 3y ago

> CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits. The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K. This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.

porphyra 3y ago
Yeah the data seems sketchy but then Elon-haters anxious to see X fail will gobble it up as if it were gospel just to satiate their confirmation bias. The truth is probably somewhere in between... there are probably actually a lot of bots on X but not nearly as bad as this report makes it seem.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
>The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K. While I agree that this feels like an ad for CHEQ, their scale would presumably be based on how many ads their partners placed on various platforms. They could be buying far more ads on TikTok than on Instagram for some reason.
crowcroft 3y ago
'Ad fraud' and 'bot traffic' tools really don't have any true insight into these walled gardens. None of them are running their own code on anyone's device to track anything, at best they're processing data given to them from a Meta/TikTok/X etc. API that might have a bit more data other people don't have access to. Maybe that uncovers some new insight and some egregious cases of fraud occasionally, but ultimately the big platforms are basically just saying 'trust me bro' and getting rubber stamped by these vendors. I don't doubt X is full of bot traffic, but Meta might just be better at fudging their numbers to CHEQ for all we know.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

He should just sell twitter and focus on real things. This whole saving the town square free speech thing was fun for a bit and now everyone knows twitter was never the town square and free speech was never a problem. Tesla stocks are tumbling because of his bullshit.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

I'd imagine that Elon and Twitter would deliberately keep bot numbers in their reports to make it seem like the website is doing better than ever. Can Elon / Twitter straight up lie and share fake or misleading numbers? Would that be illegal and result in any kind of legal action, or are would they be allowed to lie and mislead because they're a private company? It's not like these reports would be audited by any external sources. Asking genuinely if anyone is familiarized with this legal domain.

MattGaiser 3y ago
Being public didn't stop him from lying about Tesla information. This would generally be fraud, whether public or private, but that is extremely under prosecuted.

silisili 3y ago

Anyone who has been on Twitter lately could tell you that. Click any mildly popular thread, and you get about 25% crypto scams, 25% OF, 20% irrelevant clickbait, and maybe 25% at least somewhat relevant replies. The other 5% are also bots complaining that the replies aren't about the post, odd as that sounds.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I think one limiting factor is the fact that most posts aren't particularly deep or insightful, so the intellectual space from which one can engage on the subject is pretty limited. So most people who engage with content of this sort are just clout chasers trying to get attention or scammers. Is it really surprising that if Elon amplifies some post with a single exclamation mark all of the replies will be completely inane and full of spam? Another factor is account size. You can still find interesting replies in accounts that are relatively small, especially when the author takes time to manually hide spam and scams. But once an account goes beyond a certain size they just become a magnet for nonsense. It's pure quantity over quality. Elon has the biggest number of followers but the quality is abysmal.
- jsheard 3y ago
  Ironically discussions tend to be better in circles where nobody wants to pay for the blue checkmark on principle, because the comments there are still sorted using the old ranking system. But as soon as bluechecks start posting they get shunted to the top regardless of quality, burying all the good replies from non-bluechecks.
  - nothercastle 3y ago
    Where do you find these circles all the comments are spam.
lemoncookiechip 3y ago
The blue checkmark is the main cause of this, or rather, the fact that it automatically boosts your comment over those who don't have one. This led to the current engagement farming meta, where none of the comments are about the OP itself (save for smaller accounts and even then.) EDIT: Sometimes I find myself holding the spacebar, doom scrolling to reach the "peasant" comments, because at least they're actual comments.

DonHopkins 3y ago

This is just a lead-up to one hell of an election.

NetOpWibby 3y ago

LOL LMAO! Remember when Musk said there weren't any bots on his platform? He had the bot problem under control?

Alupis 3y ago

I would really like to know more about how they determine what is "fake" versus real. > CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich's company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client's page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website. This does not seem anywhere near foolproof, and seems like it would have a small sample pool to analyze. It seems to me the overwhelming majority of bots are not following links... meaning they are sampling only a specific type of bot behavior and attempting to extrapolate that to the entire platform. That seems fallible. Additionally, the compared sites are not... comparable. It's not fair to compare twitter with Mashable, TikTok, Instagram, or even Facebook. The type of community is different, and the type of content is different. Twitter is much more of a broadcasting/informational platform (ie. shouting into the wind) and therefore lends itself to bot accounts a lot more than your average Facebook account, for instance. This is why for years the Twitter API (aka. "Firehose") has been such a contentious issue and other social platforms like Facebook's have not.

happytiger 3y ago

> The majority of traffic from and on x may be fake. There I fixed it. The question should also be, “how much of the general Internet is similarly faked?” How could anyone ever tell if it wasn’t badly done?

arbuge 3y ago

We advertise on X and have done so for many years now (well, it was Twitter for most of that period). Indeed we can confirm that we saw a big change happen around a couple of months ago or so - sometime towards the end of last year. Our ads started getting literally orders of magnitude more traffic - we reduced the bids by a factor of 30x (no typo - that's thirty) and were surprised to see them taken up to the budget limit completely... we ended up spending a minor fraction of what we spent before for a lot more traffic. So far, so good, right? Not so much. None of the traffic converted anymore. All useless. I can't remember the last actual conversion from X our conversion tracking software recorded at this point... weeks ago for sure. Formerly we got several a day.

jrflowers 3y ago
How long with no conversions do you typically continue ad spend?
- garciasn 3y ago
  Depends on the type of ad and its intent. But, no one should be advertising on Twitter for any reason anymore. It’s not brand safe and it’s always been absolutely trash; but, now it’s even worse. Shift your budget to any other meaningful platform within the channel; you’ll be glad you did.
  - oefrha 3y ago
    Political ads should do just fine. I was in Hong Kong for two weeks late last year and every time I opened Twitter there I saw a promoted post for a voachinese.com article (something something China bad). It’s always VOA Chinese even though my language is clearly English, and my account is completely passive, never tweeted anything, liked anything or followed anyone, most of my visits are HN referrals about something tech related. It was quite surreal, like they bought the entire ad space of the region or something.
- arbuge 3y ago
  It’s not a bad idea to keep stuff running on a shoestring budget to keep an eye on things, in case things change again.

nomilk 3y ago

What motivates someone create a bot to click on ads? Is that to waste competitor's ad spend? Or some other purpose?

smadge 3y ago
Maybe > Ads revenue sharing lets you share revenue from verified user's organic impressions of ads displayed in replies to content you post on X. Accounts can post content, and have bots click on ads shown in the replies, and gain a portion of the ad revenue.
- nomilk 3y ago
  In that case there's a huge incentive to create bots to click on ads! It could be easily solved if twitter can distinguish between bot and human clicks, and only share revenue on the latter.

nomadiccoder 3y ago

> It's a small portion of the relevant data, and it's not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend. that seems like an odd statement to make in the article

brentm 3y ago

Probably bots operated by the X revenue generation skunkworks.

nojvek 3y ago

Xitter is perhaps Elon’s Xittest company so far. I was a daily user. With so many bots and ads, I only visit when I see an interesting link on the wide web. I still find to hard to digest Elon blew ~40 billion on it and made it worse.

theshrike79 3y ago

Wasn't Musk supposed to end all the bots? How are they getting around the limits? Even Nitter is packing its bags because the site and API are so restrictive. And I had to remove twitter title fetching from my IRC bot ages ago because the API shut down and would've been too expensive for a hobby project. It literally didn't do anything except use the API to grab info about a url to a tweet.

naet 3y ago
I honestly think removing API access was done to prevent researchers from getting accurate data out of Twitter, making Twitter themselves the only source of information around platform usage. Spam has obviously not been reduced in any way by the API changes. I think they already had an easy time tracking API account misuse and knew it wouldn't reduce spam in any meaningful way. Maybe a bit of a conspiracy theory. Also possible Mr Musk just decided API access = spam and shut it down on a whim. Definitely not easy having a boss who makes snap decisions like that and doesn't tolerate any pushback or dissent.