Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

You have an argument with someone on twitter and the next second 4 or 5 newly formed eggs with 1 follower apiece pile in to defend the other POV, sometimes without regard to civility.

It could be a coincidence.

Or it could be that the person you were debating let their ID out in another way.

Edit: Just to be clear, I was talking about the Freudian "Id" in all caps, used these days as a short-hand for a sort of unfiltered emotional inner child, and not "I.D." which is short for identification.

For instance a Tweet with 100 retweets is substantially more likely to generate additional retweets / be shown more by Twitter's algorithm / etc vs. a tweet with 10 retweets. And scale that up!

Easy to build an experiment and quantify even on a small level for NYT.

"Buy social media followers" is a straightforward business.

For mine, I scraped a bunch of Instagram pictures for photos, auto-generated a bunch of bios using a few basic parameters, e.g. "Beer lover, proud parent." Names were easy - the most popular first & last names from census records, mix and match. Grab a few lat/longs and convert them to the biggest US cities and you have a location, find some data source to tweet from (breaking news is easiest) and you have a fully automated, human-like Twitter account. For bonus points, Pick a random color toward the low ends of the hexadecimal range ( rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f)++rand(a..c)++rand(0..f) works fine) and you even look like your page is personalized down to the color.

Start following random people and 10% follow back (even more if you follow people who are tweeting about similar keywords as you - kindred spirits I guess).

The only tricky part is making sure you don't cross lines with your IPs. You could buy/rent them privately, but you really only want to keep a few accounts (3-5) to each IP, so that gets expensive ($.75/IP/month) when you don't have a really good reason to use your accounts. You can scrape free listings for them, but those are nasty, slow, and can cause bans if Twitter decides to take down a whole range or if you are forced to switch IPs too quickly.

Device type, browser, etc. is easy to spoof.

Should you decide to, it's also really easy to change name, username, and profile picture of an account in the future. So if I wanted a few thousand Trump-supporting (or Trump-hating) sock puppets I could have them today.

If you don't want to buy/create/manage Twitter accounts yourself you can get access to what's called a "panel." A panel is basically an automated, coin-operated network of fake accounts that you can control at wholesale prices. Want 5,000 followers? Plug $1/1,000 followers into the panel, supply the username, and you'll have them in a couple of minutes. Or resell 5,000 followers for $25 and pocket the $20 difference. For example of a panel, see this ad on blackhatworld: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-biggest-smm-panel-yout.... Nothing special about this one, just the first I found when I googled. They're a dime a dozen.

I'm certain there are millions of fake accounts for every service imaginable.

I would like to see someone write the story of the overarching result of what a world will look like in an increasing internet-focused world, when disinformation campaigns can be funded by the highest bidder, and actual individual voices get drained out.

[1] Reports of Putin using online troll brigades pre-dates the creation of Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

It's impossible to win a competitive SEO game without a PBN for link manufacturing, a bunch of lackeys and bots posting on astroturfed accounts, and so forth. I learned that if I'm going to do another business that depends on traffic, there will be no option but to spam and turf aggressively.

Google's dirty secret is that it's been completely and thoroughly gamed for a long time now. People are just used to sorting through the crap.

You haven't found a massive network of fake accounts. You found a script kiddy or two who didn't know enough to mask their activity or didn't care.

Every April Fool's Day I love to mess with family members. A (hypothetically) good effort:effect ratio I have found is Craigslist: Go into some large city's section (NYC, Austin, Sf, etc) and put up a listing for a 'free xbone' or a 'free PSS1', or something similarly typo'd. Explain that you are giving your kids' Xbone away because of a failing grade, you are moving overseas, your boyfriend cheated on you, etc. Then put down the number of the person to be pranked as the contact info. Now, here is the magic part: Specify that the callers for the free stuff must open the call with a Wookie sound, must text back in only haikus about salmon, must only refer to the xbox-one as a sausage, etc. It'll take the prank-ee a few hours to clear that mess up. This works wonders for April 1st day jokes, is fairly harmless, and generates a lot of fun stories.

The thing I am trying to say to the dear NYT reporter, is that you don't necessarily need bots to do this work for you, and not really even money either, just the promise of something for the low price of the time it takes to make a phone call is usually enough. Greed, I guess, works for a very low commission.

e.g.: http://freebeacon.com/politics/trumps-twitter-followed-milli...

For example, Hootsuite Amplify is a platform designed to dominate social media by making it easy for your company's employee base to share and promote curated content.

This has a similar effect to botnets, except it's not violating t&c.

We're entering a world where authentic conversation is harder and harder to find. Historically personal content such as emails and tweets are now carefully constructed and managed, but still presented as personal content.

https://hootsuite.com/products/amplify

Many then switched to Facebook, presumably hoping that the "Real Name" policy would improve things.

The interesting thing is that clicking on many of the Facebook profiles on these comments leads to curiously sterile profiles, with a few friends. Some of the most vehemently pro-Trump comments seem to have originated from these accounts, especially on certain Conservative sites during the Republican Primary season.

Facebook seems to have no interest (or ability) to clean this up.

People make fake accounts for everything everywhere for all sorts of reasons. Seems as though you stumbled on some fakes that may all be related (all posting starwars quotes) but maybe not. Could be just some off the shelf software that creates twitter accounts.

Probably a non-negligible percent of people with the job description "social media manager" create small armies of bots to do their bidding.

The first stop for any investigative journalist looking into this would have to be blackhatworld.com ... it has a really intimidating name but it's all just about marketing/spamming that violates terms of use.

> "Their potential threats are real and scary due to the sheer size of the botnet," he said.

Kind of overstates things. These accounts will likely be used for spam or advertising of some sort. Journalists have a distorted worldview when it comes to the importance of Twitter. I know you all love it, but the rest of the world doesn't really care.

To appear more legit these bots also copy user comments and post them to /r/askreddit in threads that are similar named but most often not exactly the same as the original post. I suspect that often this /r/askreddit thread is also created by another bot from the same farm.

I'm not sure what the owners do with these bots, but I suspect you could downvote views you don't like or upvote videos to the frontpage and make lots of views and money from that.

Also 350,000 accounts is hardly "massive" as the clickbait title suggests. No way that can account for more than a small percentage of traffic.

I'm curious because I've seen the same posts in different places and now see a ton of comments boiling down to "Source?" again. The later used to be everywhere 8-9 years ago, but were typically people that actually wanted a source to read not just spam the question. Now it seems they are spamming it to distract from the real conversations.

On the contrary, Facebook is the last halo of peace for me. I only talk to my friends, never get unwarranted messages, spam, mail subscriptions, renewals, ads, scary calls/emails, ... you name it. Now if I could email via Facebook, that would be awesome.

People have bought fake traffic, users and comments for that amount of time too. Often en mass with automated systems importing it from third parties like Yahoo Answers.

It's just that the commercial social networks are now the main target, and the scale of these operations has gone up accordingly.

I'm not in that industry , so I'm genuinely asking

Any public service must plan for its ToS to be broken by bad actors.

We know they cost nothing to us, and so, any time we find a website and approach it as a total stranger and create a cheap account quickly, we know other strangers are capable of the same.

So, clearly no substantial population is buying into fake news.

Those that do, are likely also paying hundreds of dollars on craigslist for viagra, using escrow accounts.

Anti-abuse teams tend to be relatively small. We aren't talking hundreds of engineers here, we're talking like maybe 10-15 engineers. When you look at the relative effectiveness of different networks, you can be comparing something as trivial and random as whether one or two people happened to figure out a good strategy or not. There is no need for conspiracy theories.

The costs of accounts on different networks is a reasonable proxy for effectiveness at bot fighting. My favourite site has always been this one:

https://buyaccs.com/

From a quick check it seems Twitter is getting better at it. Prices used to be more like in the low $20/k range. Now the low end accounts are $45/k and if you want PVAd/profiled it's up near $90. Compare to Gmail where the price is more like $280/k. Or Facebook EN accounts, $120. Good to see my old colleagues doing such a good job!

In the case of Twitter, my view is that their relatively low performance on botting is a side effect of the whole social justice / campus politics movement. I heard from a friend who works there that their focus was switched almost entirely to fighting human abuse like people being nasty to each other, political extremism, terrorism, etc. If you remember, just a few years ago Twitter was being attacked in the media for being filled with trolling and nastyness. So of course that became their priority. Anti-botting took a back seat.

Nowadays there's suddenly a bout of anti-Russian hysteria. Suddenly bots are in focus again. There are conspiracy theories about botted accounts being used to convince people to change their political positions. Having worked in the industry for years I am deeply skeptical about this. I never once saw bots being used for political ends or anything even approaching it. There is a lot of disinformation out there about Russia right now from western sources, and a lot of paranoia that doesn't seem to be justifiable.

I'd guess RT does far, far more to create pro-Russian support than anything happening on Twitter does.

Interestingly, #20 hasn't been updated since 26 August last year, and its timeline contains only the two entries "temato" and "mecagoentusmuertos", which are Spanish phrases translating respectively to "I kill you" and "I shit on your dead". Beyond simple unneighborliness, whether they have any significance and what that might be I have to leave as an exercise for the reader, because I have no idea.

An anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter account run by a human, in the way that a human is expected to use a Twitter account, is not a fake account: it's real, just pseudonymous. A bot account that's clearly a bot, like @big_ben_clock or @choochoobot, isn't a fake account either: it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.

From the article: "These accounts did not act like the bots other researchers had found but were clearly not being run by humans."

One thing a network of fake accounts could be doing is inflating follower counts. A follow from a pseudonymous account that corresponds to an actual human isn't fake. Even a constant factor or constant term from a small number of humans with multiple accounts isn't particularly deceptive. But thousands or millions of follows from accounts run by a handful of humans is deceptive.

Another thing a fake account could be doing is spreading propaganda by creating the impression that many people agree with a political opinion, when these "people" are just canned responses, or humans assisted by automation (but capable of making human replies across large numbers of accounts).

I personally don't find much added value in those tweets, "regular people" or not. They're basically YouTube comment level at this point.

Maybe people are sick of hearing the term.

There also seems to be some confusion about its meaning and its purpose.

That said, swarms of Windows Phones does smell funny.

Using a network of bots to detect and report obvious bot accounts.