Also, bot makers don't care about fooling the New York Times, they care about fooling Twitter. If Twitter applied this analysis, the bot makers would adapt to it. It only looks like it works until you start to use it.
The problem with the arms-race argument here is that it implies that just because an arms race is inevitable that the only acceptable course of action is total capitulation. Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference. They just simply don't want to.
(As for false positives, I've seen plenty of people whose accounts were suspended for reasons unclear to them; Twitter seems to care very little whether its captive userbase is pissed off or not.)
How would they do this without triggering enough false positives to destroy their product?
I mean seriously, if you are capable of doing this that well, you could probably walk into a job paying >>$750k/yr at any of the large tech companies, because they'd be falling all over themselves trying to get at your magic.
- captcha that isn't hard for humans is often easy to automate
- captcha that is hard to automate frustrates a lot of humans too
- and to add insult to injury you can "automate" the hard ones too by paying like $1 per 1000 captchas or something (think Amazon Turk like stuff)
This implies that Twitter has demonstrated that they care about practicing discretion when suspending accounts, and that they care what 99% of their (human) userbase thinks, and that Twitter's product is Twitter accounts. But they haven't; they don't; and it's not. The state of being pissed off at Twitter is the perpetual existence of all Twitter power users. Unless you're a celebrity, Twitter doesn't care what you say about Twitter. And the only thing important to Twitter's business model is keeping celebrities on Twitter. The reason that they don't give a damn about cracking down on bots isn't because they don't have enough $750k engineers, it's because dealing a blow to the egos of their Influencers by banning their botted followers would threaten their bottom line, both in terms of outrage from the 1% of Twitter accounts that matter and in terms of depressing their wildly inflated metrics.
It’s easy to see how much harder Facebook and Google accounts are to create bots for than Twitter. Twitter doesn’t care.
This really does seem to be the case. And I find it incredibly distasteful that they were used by DJT in his campaign and continues to be used. It was rarely a place where politicians posted anything, and now it seems to be the first place where any of them do.
Twitter was founded in 2006 and Barack Obama joined in 2007. Today he has 15.4k tweets. Seems like a lot to me.