Uncovering a network of “adult dating” spam accounts on Twitter
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My twitter feed has became much more civilized after muting retweets[1] from anyone I follow. This leaves only genuine comments & discussions. I can again focus on what people are saying and toxic accounts that previously slipped through in the noise become visible allowing me to weed them out.
[1] https://medium.com/@Luca/how-to-turn-off-retweets-for-everyo...
Do you have a citation for this? Or do you have some resources you could share that support this?
The tl;dw of this is that when defining "bots", most researchers used very misleading metrics e.g. ">20 tweets/day" and the worries and studies about "social bots" shaping discussion on twitter are generally not founded in reality.
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9268-social_bots_fake_news_und_f...
Back in that day my brother and I both played on various MUDs (multi-user-dungeon/dimension). At the time most people had dial-up, due to my father's business we had an ISDN line and multiple computers, to prevent bots they made the assumption that multiple logins from the same IP were bots. So to combat this without blanket bans, the mods would warp us into a private area and have us type a different list of things simultaneously to satisfy themselves that we were actual people. It was a low-tech solution to a low-volume problem in a low-user-count game.
However, something similar like making the user do a captcha on each login or post if they're suspected of being a bot would be a low bar for a human to cross, but someone running a bot network would probably have to invest some time or resources into overcoming the captcha. (Mechanical Turk, machine learning, captcha farm, etc.)
It's the reason I will never use CloudFlare for any product I build. Their DDOS and spam protection does protect you, but it also literally drives away users.
The question Twitter should be asking is not, "Which accounts are bots?". That would just be bad business. Instead, they should be asking at what point does the presence of bots hurt the user experience more than imposing barriers on usage.
The latter wouldn't be such a problem if they had an established, WORKING process for appeals. Or to get in contact with a human at all.
As for the spambots: ignore them, they don't do much besides luring morons to porn sites. The Nazis and other similar trolls are vastly more dangerous for Twitter and for societies.
In particular, it's important not to feed an adversary's OODA loop. If you kill bot accounts immediately upon detection, you give them information about what you can detect. That encourages them to create things you can't detect. Better to wait until the network becomes a problem and then roll up the whole thing at once. That tells them a lot less about how they got caught, and burns more of their work for the information you do give up.
Those accounts and their interactions get wrapped up into overall stats presented to investors. They're not going to clamp down too hard on bot traffic as it's inflating their actual user base and interactions.
As a content company blinded by growth stats, I'd want bots craving out content on my platform too as long as it was legible.
As someone trying to build a quality platform, I wouldn't want them on there or would at least want them marked with a robot icon.
Which side do you think Twitter is on?
I see a lot more efforts like this coming from outside of Twitter than inside, and these kinds problems are rampant.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/twitter-offered-rt-1...
Their response after that reveal was "We do not have any comment on our private conversations with any advertiser". Which, mostly confirms it. If it was a made up story, they would have quickly refuted it as such ("RT made this stuff up like they always do etc").
Not only did they not care about American voters, they were an active part in allowing an external entity to manipulate them. But of course we all believe they changed now and their hearts and minds are one with the American voters. Phew, I can finally sleep better at night.
The problem is personalized ads. We need to get rid of them, regardless of who does it.
It's the same thing pretty much. It's not like some Wall Street bank is going to have a lot more care and concern for the American voters than some country out there. The story about Russians is only interesting as it was turned into a rather successful PR campaign and a lot of time was spent writing, talking, investigating, and mud slinging based on it.
> The problem is personalized ads. We need to get rid of them, regardless of who does it.
It's going to be hard. The company which provides the most refined and exact profiles in the ad space will win. So even if there was some company that decided they are not doing this individual targeting, they would lose out and go out of business while company with the most detailed profiles would win. In a way I think that is why Google is afraid of FB. They realized at some point that FB holds much more nuanced and detailed profiles on people.