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Comment by rhema | Hacker News Reader

Even with a 95% accuracy of detection, a good algorithm can point the "is a bot" finger wrongly at many people. If 10,000 bots are detected and banned, it could upset 500 real people. So, Twitter has to ask if its easier to put up with 9,500 not-so-active bots, or to potentially make 500 people very upset.

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And academic and journalistic investigations into political bots have often subsequently discovered that a non-trivial proportion of apparent bot accounts are actually manned by ordinary people who genuinely feel retweeting certain influencers for hours on end and indiscriminately replying to other political figures with memes and slogans was a good use of their time in election cycles. It's Human Turing Test Failure central.

Any source for this? Not disputing it, but would like to see some evidence.

Wasn't there a mass bot purge a couple of weeks ago immediately followed by complaints that Twitter was silencing important conservative voices because they're part of the Deep State?

I believe the complaint was reduced follower counts reduced credibility of some real accounts

the 34c3 talk "social bots, fake news and filterbubbles" comes to mind (unfortunately originally in German)

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...

>> retweeting certain influencers for hours on end and indiscriminately replying to other political figures with memes and slogans

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...

>"And academic and journalistic investigations into political bots have often subsequently discovered that a non-trivial proportion of apparent bot accounts are actually manned by ordinary people ..."

Do you have a citation for this? Or do you have some resources you could share that support this?

It feels like the solution is some version of person-hood verification.

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.)

The idea that real users will only be slightly inconvenienced is something I see often. However, that imposes real costs. A significant percentage of those users will not be determined enough to solve a captcha every time they login, and their usage will drop off.

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.

As far as I like to believe this is the reason behind this, I can't but assume this is a very simplistic view of the situation. I'm sure if they wanted they could do a better job verifying against bots; they don't have to instantly ban. They could instead require users to solve some captchas, submit some form of official verification, etc.

They apparently delete hundreds of thousands of accounts every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248845.

> So, Twitter has to ask if its easier to put up with 9,500 not-so-active bots, or to potentially make 500 people very upset.

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.

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