Up to 48M Twitter accounts may be bots | Hacker News Reader

Up to 48M Twitter accounts may be bots

msn.com

Came across one the other day, just by mentioning in a post "blue plaque", got instant like and retweet.

This started me thinking of a little game - what post with the limitations of 140 characters could you post that would trigger the attention of the most bots for automatic retweets/likes?

It's on my to do list, when bored, but I'd imagine others have had comparable thoughts and may of already had a go.

Anybody got any other examples?

Mention Beiber and you'll get a swarm of likes, Rts, and responses. It used to be a personal game for me to get a friend to mention him and watch the swarm.

It used to kill the usefulness of your notifications for at least a day. ;)

I don't think it works

https://twitter.com/brndnmtthws/status/840680198102228993

Why, just why, did you add the kissing emoji?

That's the most important part

Technically, the post said to mention Beiber, not Bieber.

Yikes, I messed up.

Oh man, disappointed that doesn't work anymore. I guess the bots have moved onto other oddballs. :(

JavaScript and Angular

Pretty sure mentioning "growth hack" would trigger lot of bots.

#maga

the trump astroturfing army is aggressive

There's some terms that are absolute lightning rods and that's one of them.

Is that an acronym?

"Make America Great Again" - Trump's election slogan

Can't tell if serious or sophisticated subversive meme magician!

If anyone actually can't tell try this and give an analysis of your experience with the Hateful People of america

It does seem to bring the vitriolic regressive leftists out, you're right.

Let's play! Looks like I am losing in that game ...

https://twitter.com/DropinIn/status/840695021066051584

I was trying to build an online presence as an indie game dev for a while, #gamedev and #indiegames generated a lot of bot retweets. Bot retweets tend to cascade, too - other bots that may have missed the original tweet pick up the retweets. Finding the right hashtags can be a pretty good way to get (human) eyes on your message, due to that exponential growth factor.

> Bot retweets tend to cascade, too

There's a reason for that. Twitter offers an API to get a massive stream of tweets. They used to provide it in various sizes, leading up to what was called the "firehose". Now they only have a streaming API with filtering (but gets a very small, but constant random sample of tweets), and the "firehose", which is all of them -- and you have to pay for it through a third party partnered with Twitter. When you're doing large-scale datamining, the firehose can be invaluable, albeit expensive (Depends, but is anywhere between $300-$6000/month). But bot makers don't always have that kind of scratch, so they will just consume the public API, which is generally good enough.

My bot is listening to this and it is really awesome! I was surprised to learn how many people on Twitter daily post 'i am bored' up to 300,000 per day! With that amount if data it is readily possible to build robust ML systems.

I found another https://twitter.com/Sitcom_Bot triggered by the word "comedy" it seems.

Better title: "Up to 48 Twitter accounts may be human"

Snark aside, there is no way around this. Followers in digital public spaces are representative of social status, the demand for appearing popular will never go away and so neither will the bots.

Confirmed identity with the service would resolve this.

And result in a rich trove of rich identities to be stolen.

This isn't necessarily true. If world governments could use their records to create an OAuth-like service, you could uniquely verify citizenship without giving away personally identifying information

Shall I go ahead and start the over/under pool on how long it would take before it was hacked? I think it's a compelling idea, but it would probably be the most-interesting target in the world.

I think a singular, required identity service on the Internet is one of the greatest threats to free speech.

how about a voluntary one? Let people be authenticated and let people see how many followers are authenticated or not.

Depends on how it's implemented. As always, the devil's in the details. If it were properly sandboxed, it seems it shouldn't require anything more than the government's unique ID eg a Social Security Number as a backing for tokens granted. In that regard it wouldn't be any more juicy than any other common store of SSNs, of which there are sadly quite a few.

You would presumably be able to use this information to de-anonymize previously created tokens, but that would require you to gain access to the token as used, which would also require a breach of Twitter or whoever else. It's not unthinkable, but if Twitter is breached you might have enough info to de-anonymize its users anyway.

Right, and even after years of this, they've chosen not to do that. Nor require even a confirmed email address.

Twitter is arguably built to be a spam platform.

Streaming API? oh man...

While automatic control of computerized interfaces should surprise no one, “bot”-like behavior is not limited to computers and isn’t new. One should always be skeptical even when something comes from humans: for instance, a “customer review” could be a paid reviewer, or someone talking on the nightly news could be essentially controlled by the puppet strings of their organization and not really voicing their own position. Ideally no one ever puts too much faith in what they hear from a handful of people because that is not statistically significant (there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. alone, billions in the world; sample sizes must be gigantic).

Where “millions” of accounts become dangerous is when trying to determine if even a “statistically significant sample size” is legitimate. I seriously doubt that most organizations ever come close to finding a large enough sample in the first place before reporting a finding. And yet, if they primarily look at online postings instead of actually talking to people, it’s likely that even a large sample is totally messed up. That should concern everyone.

And one of them is mine. It recommends an event once you tweet to her. It is actually a service that many people appreciate. So in summary, bot != bad.

#notallbots?

#botlivesmatter

To compare, I looked up the estimates[1][2] on Facebook and if we use 170 million out of 1.4 billion, that's ~11.7%. That is in the ballpark of Twitter's 15% (48m/319m).

I guess if you make a popular service that doesn't require a credit-card payment or phone SMS text as a test for human verification, you should expect >10% of fake accounts even with state-of-the-art heuristics detection.

[1] not sure why Huffington Post is top google link about it but the other news sites say the same 170M: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-parsons/facebooks-war-co...

[2] 2015 1Q user count: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

You can look for proxy / hosting IPs. These bots are most likely running on servers.

So wouldn't it be relatively simple to block AWS/Azure/etc ip blocks AND duplicate accounts from single addresses? Wouldn't that be a large drop in bots right there?

Corollary: I once played a large MMO that intentionally inflated user numbers right before they were acquired via content updates that encouraged the creation of multiple bots per actual player. I'm sure at some level executives are aware that bots are good for business and allow them to persist.

Heh, personally, it feels like 80% of twitter are various "Social Media Automation Tools" following and retweeting each other.

This reminds me of the Onion Talks episode, "Using Social Media To Cover For Lack Of Original Thought"[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY

I once wrote an automated tool that got in a loop with someone else's automated tool.

Bot love.

This is a result of what I call "audience economy". People want an audience and are willing to pay for it. Audience likes to see a prior audience. Bots enable prior audiences. Platforms like fiverr enable bots.

Get 5000 twitter followers for $5

Those 5000 fake followers make you look good to people that come across you, and they flow.

So it's all about an initial audience.

It feels very discouraging to start out in this space once a given platform reaches a certain level of maturity. For instance, Insta now seems littered with these local service/small-business accounts spamming the most optimised hashtags with inspirational quotes on stock photographs; most engagement seems to come from bots and scripts being used by these same accounts. (Maybe I'm playing the game wrong.)

Does buying 5k followers really help in any way? Won't the more sophisticated users (ideally those whom you'd be targeting as followers) see through this based on your engagement rates, or does having a certain number of followers hold some weight with the algos which leads to your stuff attracting more engagement, followers, etc. in some kind of virtuous cycle?

Unfortunately no. When a social platform becomes "big" as in, reaches early majority, spam finds a way in. No algorithm can stop it. Quantity kills quality. The "sophisticated" early adopters lose it.

Look around. People will do whatever it takes to get to "front page", "top stories", and such.

Medium obsesses about quality, but their top stories, fueled by recommendations from "the common man", are full of junk. Same with LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook.

HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

> HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

lol

Look at Imgur, it has become a series of memes, reused content from (Twitter, FB, etc), or repetitive "dumps". original content is automatically downvoted

Twitter never sounded like a great idea to me. Years went by and I finally made an effort in the last few months to get on it so I could follow political tweets. I found that it sucked in all the ways I thought it would suck. When you find a good tweet, you get to enjoy reading it for a few seconds, but it leaves you empty and searching for another one.

I think there's a general feeling that Twitter has not much growth potential and it's slowly becoming obsolete.

If it's filling up with bots, that strikes me as a sign of decay.

I'm thinking that this is not as `black&white` as said.

There are accounts which actually are used by people/companies, they post authentic content but do some automated actions.

E.g. a company account which tweets authentic content for their field but on the other hand has automated retweets on certain hashtags in order to gain their authors as followers or to come up as related to other accounts in same field.

Also to mention that there are services such as IFTTT which actually can help you to automate such actions and make bot-like behavior.

I guess the same would apply to Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.

Does it really surprise anyone?

I figured it would be higher, since there's not much there to hold it to some upper bound.

Guess you're right

The USC researchers own research says there's a 57 percent chance @realdonaldtrump is a bot

http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump

Have you read it? It sounds the like output of a Markov chain text generator. Sad!

There's a method to that madness. Whether he is actually aware of it or not (I lean more towards the former), that stream-of-consciousness styled rhetoric is incredibly magnetizing to a large percentage of people. In my research on AI-driven political engagement, I found that while intensively complex generated argumentation can engage relatively sharper audiences without arousing suspicion, it is more computationally expensive, and those people do not have as much flex in opinion. The use of simpler, "like output of a Markov chain text generator" styled tools help separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of pliability.

I see what you did there

Of the 48M, somehow 31.6M of them are inexplicably One Direction fans

This won't suprised anyone that uses twitter. In fact I rely on 2-3 bots to retweet my tweets and so get more coverage. They have a place, it's not all bad.

The article said that.

There is a recent trend in anti-Twitter chatter. I seem to remember msn-bots being all the rage once upon a time.

I'd ask for my money back if I'd been marketing on Twitter.

There's really no legitimate reason why twitter allows follows via their API[1]. I'm not sure if they see some benefit from allowing spam-follow bots to run wild or what they could possibly be thinking.

[1]: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/crea...

There's also no reason to believe that botting is done via API in most cases. I would think it's easier to detect + ban that way. I don't know how it's done in the majority of cases, but I know it's not particularly difficult to write a bot that drives an actual browser and emulates human mouse behavior.

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