Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Trump posts and the comments look like:
“Liberals are the worst” “Trump is a god”
“Send 5 ETH to receive 10ETH”
Obviously Trump is a great shit poster himself, but virtually everyone with a lot of followers end up with nothing but stupid as their replies.
A Danish politician recently commented on the problem by saying that we’ve alway had village idiots, but social media let them lose.
and i recently went to a design conference where i saw bret victor give a great talk. i found out about the conference on twitter.
So what do you think the causal difference is between your experience and others? Are you just more diligent about curating the list of people you follow?
And it is interesting to watch because people get into arguments trying to convince each other seemingly but in 140 characters it just sounds insulting and terse. Well sometimes it is simply insulting: "Oh you called me a stupid idiot! Of course, that's a great point. I will step back and ponder an alternative approach to this problem"
The thing you don't want to do is try to keep up with every tweet. Just follow a bunch of people you find interesting, and once in a while pop in and see what people are talking about.
I just gave up.
What is Facebook? It's an RSS feed of your friends and family's lives. Facebook has replaced Blogger et al, which primarily syndicated through actual RSS, because it was an accessible, simple way to a) create a feed and b) allow publishers to retain some control over their content (by e.g. blocking an undesirable consumer).
You had to have some technical competency to set up a blog and an RSS reader, and all Facebook did was fix that and bring the power of syndication to the RSS-incapable masses.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter's value proposition is that it's supposed to be a continuous, temporary real-time vein on whatever is happening at that moment. It doesn't really do a good job of that filling that niche IMO. The only time I've had an impulse to use Twitter is during something like a live news event, and these days I think something like Snapchat does this better (though they're both infuriatingly difficult to access and navigate, decimating their practical utility).
In practice Twitter has regressed to the lowest common denominator of "microblogging". The thing that continues to give it power is its interactivity. Because the messages are so short and feel so quick, Twitter ensures that people will see our message, react, and that hits our feedback loops ASAP, demanding follow-on after follow-on.
One interpretation of today's Twitter is that it's just the unwashed masses clamoring for a fleeting glimpse of attention from someone they admire. This corresponds with Twitter's early adoption as a celebrity messaging platform for actors (iirc Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to get 1M followers).
The only time Twitter's current incarnation is useful is when it allows the everyman to get a message to someone else who would be guarded, e.g., common citizens potentially inciting a credible presidential campaign as in the infamous Russ_Steinberg tweet [0] .
It's depressing to think that so much behavior hinges on this rabid attention-vying, but it's also impossible to deny the power when some otherwise-inaccessible influence is established. I assume this is why people continue to use it, despite the fact that 99% of tweets drop into the void.
I cannot filter HN's feed to only get content from the people I want to follow. And don't tell me about shitty apps.
Therefore it does not qualify as an RSS reader.
The reason these companies use it as a PR platform is obvious - there's a lot of users. I can't even fathom why it has lots of users though, at least not without mocking the state of society today.
in other cases entire subcultures that used to exist on forums have mainly moved to twitter, like the fighting game community or somethingawful-style humor
then a lot of people like to use it to follow celebrities, musicians or industry leaders
Explain this as though I'm a luddite who thinks command line email is better than bbs, irc, and everything else.
I mostly only follow my friends on social media, but I can understand the appeal of seeing in to the lives of your favorite celebrities.
Being on Twitter is like being at an on-call press conference with all of your subjects of interest 24 hours a day. It's actually pretty bad ass. It's not all heavy with prose. It's heavy with meaning.
Unlike my Facebook network, which is almost entirely composed of friends and family, my Twitter network is composed of prominent figures, projects, and companies in which I am intensely interested
For example, I am an American and I have a passing interest in politics. I follow the President of our Great Union, who is an avid tweeter. I prefer to interpret the news as it happens, through my own unique filter and perspective. Later, I read how others interpreted it. It can be a fun contrast and I prefer to be ahead of the punch, so to speak.
And all the people in the software industry that I want to follow are on it.
Artists also use it as a low-effort gallery/WIP blog. Fun to look at stuff in that scenario as well.
Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)
If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks.
But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN...
Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.
The admins have been aware of the problem for two years but haven't cared enough to do anything about it.
It doesn't need to be effective for discussion to be valuable. It can be an effective broadcast platform, or research platform, or...
If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.
But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.
So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b.
I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)
If there's one thing I've learned about social media, it's that this totally considerate, natural thought pattern is anathema to the platform vendors.
In the real world, you expect a high Signal-to-Noise ratio, and want to reward people who speak less often because their words become more weighty/significant. Social platforms work on the exact inverse of this principle! They reward high Noise-to-Signal accounts because that keeps the psychological engagement hooks going. The platforms actively punish accounts that aren't continuously, repetitively pushing those buttons. If you ever wonder why the spammiest crap floats to the top, this is why.
We're all just flashing bulbs in the social media slot machine. If we're not frantically flashing, blinking, or otherwise making it difficult for the consumer-gambler to look away, we're not serving the platform's purpose, and we'll be replaced with a bulb that does.
I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure you could take it any other way. At least in my usage, 'like' is a signal to the poster that I liked their comment/it was a beneficial contribution, whereas 'retweet' is that AND I think it would be useful/interesting to a weirder audience. Retweeting more than likely seems backwards, and more like spam.
You can choose to mute retweets from an account without muting the whole account, so that's not too much of a problem. If you retweet too much they can mute your retweets.
Recently something changed though, and now things you Like can also show up in your friend's feeds, and I haven't found any way on the default twitter site to mute those. So Likes can actually be more spammy than retweets now!
HN itself suffers from this problem. There is apparently a heavy "controversial" penalty applied to articles that get too many comments relative to their upvotes.
But, commenting is most of HN's functionality. I comment fairly frequently; I certainly don't upvote articles anywhere near as often.
Googling for "random walk" and "sybil attack" will dump so many solid research papers in our laps it's just a tragedy nobody can be arsed to do something useful.
I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.
I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.
I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.
What if there isn't a lot demographic overlap? Twitter doesn't provide any kind of tooling that would allow one to follow only the relevant tweets in a given account. This is especially relevant if the interests/communities at issue not only don't have a lot in common, but actually spend a lot of time at odds, which is the case for many interests. It'd be impossible to have some followers from such groups who wanted to hear about the one thing without simultaneously alienating them by talking about the other thing. Computing and hunting are good examples because your average cypherpunk's opinion and worldview is much different from your average hunter's opinion and worldview.
I have personally started a handful of different Twitter accounts intended to engage with different communities. None of these perform any automatic activity at all and I basically use them for a couple of days and then give up because it's too much effort (recently, more because Twitter blocks the accounts almost-immediately).
More accounts than people is absolutely not a reliable indicator that "you have robots registering" (especially when businesses etc. are expected to register). That may be a better metric if Twitter provided useful filtration tools, but even then it'd be shoddy.
And you should be able to filter out posts accordingly, like "only showed verified" or "don't show suspected bots".
And by default, Twitter should hide suspected bots in reply/hashtag threads, so they don't get increased exposure.
I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?
Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative.
This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots.
It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers.
Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much.
So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.
I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon.
But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
"n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida."
some of these bots, were not bots btw
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-...
Any critical thinking textbook should teach about false dichotomies, let's not fall into that fallacy here!
That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking.
So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.
A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.
At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?
Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.
First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.
And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.
But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.
Because that's not the root problem. This is all a dog and pony show.
There is no transparent mechanism of control for internet publishing like there is for e.g. broadcast media via FCC licensure. The government very much wants to rein in this "Wild West" age of the internet and assert some control over the messaging.
Conditions are very favorable for such a project right now:
a) Centralization on walled gardens like Facebook, Google, et al provides a plausible choke point.
[Right now they're making everything else online "dirty", "bad", and/or "Russian", but don't be surprised when they ban it all together and anything non-Google-or-Facebook-approved becomes part of the "dark web", meaning the place that only dirty, bad Russians go, and which will effectively require special communication equipment to access. Wikileaks is a great case study in this.]
b) There's sufficient angst among the tech-savvy public to fly such controls in under the ironic pretext of "preserving the integrity of our democracy" without stirring up too much of a ruckus.
and c) The mainstream media is looking for any plausible cover story they can find after their disastrous and embarrassing coverage of the 2016 election and will go along with anything that will allow them to save a shred of face. That it paints their main competition (hyper-specialized online media) as dirty and unreliable is a bonus.
This is all very bad stuff, and that people are so easily tricked into following along because they're bitter about a political loss is as deeply disappointing as it is predictable.
I expect that the government will eventually move to establish a set of "identity verification standards" that have to be met or the site will be taken offline by court order. This will essentially end free speech on the web and allow the government to assert its control over what normal people are allowed to access, read, and/or share online.
Bottom line is that you don't have to be a Russian double-agent to be a Republican, and you don't have to be the victim of a pernicious foreign plot to lose an election against the other national political party. If you live in the Silicon Valley bubble, don't let your frustration delude you into believing otherwise.
If there was a "long-read social media" platform, it would be ignored, because you wouldn't check it in the bus queue or on the toilet.
States need to play the long game after all.
Even if just 10% of people are that dumb, 10% is more than enough to swing an election.
I am still somewhat shocked that Donald Trump is really President of the USA[1], but I am deeply convinced that denying arbitrary people their right to vote is an acceptable "solution".
[1] Really, it sounds like satire, doesn't it?
You realize how few that is right?
Do you have proof that Twitter bots influence opinion?
If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans from countries around the world who comment on USA politics?
Demanding proof of effect is an oddly defensive response that seems aimed at exonerating bad behavior. The GP didn't even assert anything about influence; just stated a fact.
But what difference does it make? Are you saying we should just accept it if we can't definitively prove it had a certain influence?
Sounds an awful lot like a certain U.S. president.
>If Russian bots influenced elections, what about the millions of real live humans
False equivalence. A concerted effort by one person to use technology in amplifying a specific narrative against an adversary is not the same as actual human beings rendering their frequently diverse opinions. Surely you see the difference.
It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets.
There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats.
Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts.
Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.
I disagree. At least it shouldn't be that hard for a company with Twitter's level of engineering and data science sophistication, and yes, I do realize that most of their best technical talent is long gone.
While nothing is a panacea, there’s little evidence that Twitter is doing even the bare minimum.
Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.
But no, Twitter had to "take matters in its own hands" and "control the ecosystem". Much good that brought.
I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish.
Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.
Also, now I come to think about it, it is a bit embarrassing that we (en) pronounce yacht as "yot". I look forward to reading a future man page describing yacht as an archaic form of the correct usage. The man page for the ls command used to describe colour as an archaic term for the "modern" form - color!
I didn't tweet anything, just followed some people I found interesting.
I don't want to verify my phone number. Fuck you twitter.
(Not giving Twitter my phone number)
I think it's deliberate b/c bots seem to be exempt from this phone number requirement.
Twitter is dying anyway, at least that is the feeling I have about the website.
I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations.
Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.
I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.
Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)
It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.
For example: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...
I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'.
There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1].
There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating.
The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media).
[1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users.
I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.
What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?
We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.
I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy, and that makes sense. But I maintain that the same article with different stylesheets should produce the same text content on the page for the user to copy.
[1]: The markup is in something approaching title case, except that words like `with` are also capitalized. Then the element is using `text-transform: uppercase`.
This is almost never the case for headers and such. New York Times or CNN have fancy logos/headlines, but we don't want to reproduce them each time we refer to the company or specific article - we just want the content. text-transform is a great way to achieve presentation need (bold headlines) without messing up content. Copying - excepting cases of visual copying, e.g. screenshot - should always have an option of content-only copying.
This obviously conflicts with Twitter's incentive to maximize their profit and brand. So the next obvious solutions are token measures.
edit: And apparently to downvote anyone who calls them out.
All Twitter has to do is develop the most intelligent software ever created and make sure it keeps inching towards generalized AI over time.
There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.
Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.
It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.
So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?
I find that hard to believe.
ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
Oh wait no we don't.
"Hey Melissa, here's my Mastodon handle, hit me up."
"Your... what?"
"My Mastodon, it's a federated social network free from any corporate overlord!"
"Whatever, freak..."
BTW Mastadon sounds like it's related to BDSM or ED meds IMHO.
"Sweetcheeks, have you heard of Mastadon?"
"I'm not into that dear!"
or
"When the moment is right... Ask your doctor about... Mastadon"
Sometimes we need to fix the things that are broken instead of leaving.
Think carefully.