Twitter to label 'good' bot accounts
bbc.com
bbc.com
They un-suspended most of them after few months of follow-up emails (and no human response) and then the automatic suspension happened again after a few weeks.
I have given up on Twitter as a development platform, and instead prefer running these bots on open platforms such as RSS now.
If Twitter wants to do this right, they must ensure that there is a clear guideline for developers to follow and fix their bot detection algorithms to avoid stupid stuff like this.
Edit: 12, not 13. Here's the relevant tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Acaptn3m0%20twittersuppor...
Use the Fediverse please. It is the ONLY ethical alternative.
edit: I know the Twitter comms people lurk here. I've tried multiple times to get you to contact me and have hit a wall. You can modmail my sub. Your engagement is requested.
They're not going to spend the money.
Twitter's track record speaks for itself.
1. Have an open platform with APIs which can r/w over entire platform.
2. Gain enough market to attract large advertisers.
3. Start restricting the content to please the advertisers.
4. Start restricting the 3rd party apps which offer superior experience and blocks your ads.
5. Start restricting general API itself.
Facebook, Twitter has gone through it, I bet Reddit will start restricting it's API next.
For some reason I still waste my time there trying to share opinions as a HK resident: no China is not just "evil", not Hong Kong is not "oppressed", yes the old idiots, communists or not, are all the same conservative cowards as anywhere else, no we dont seem to really want a bloodbath, so far.
You can imagine the amount of weird obsessive hatred I get with this opinion, from people who ve never been to China :D
Twitter suspended all by association with my main account that had access to all these different accounts via TweetDeck. (Or that’s the hypothesis, since I could find no other link across all 12)
Of course, none of this addresses malicious bots in any way. In effect, this is Twitter showing they're aware of their bot problem, but unwilling or unable to do anything about it, and are therefore doing a misdirection as a PR effort.
No, privacy doesn't work like that. Even people who are not trying to deceive others are deserving of privacy as well.
Most of my accounts (except one) on the internet are anonymous, as I don't want people to tie anything I do for fun on the internet to my real-life persona. It doesn't mean that I want to deceive people, only that I want my meatspace life to be something else than my online life.
just a [bot] marker of some kind next to the tweets that were posted by a bot. That's it. Still anonymous.
I could tell you this comment was posted by a bot, that would reveal nothing about me.
Except we aren't discussing private conversations. We are discussing broadcast conversations on twitter.
In any case real identities have been a failure anyway
wouldn't you need to know how many marketing bots there are to determine that?
making statements about goodbots/(goodbots+badbots) is difficult when the good bots already make it clear they're bots, and the bad bots are misleading.
In my experience those kinds of boutique/indie bots appear to make up a tiny percentage of total bots. If you have data that shows otherwise, I'd appreciate if you could share it.
A bot looks exactly like a normal user, except for a [BOT] label after the name. Works like a charm.
Where is the line? Technically scheduled tweets are automatic, and so, by some definition, bots.
Bots that want you to think they're human will end up with "bot verified" badges that undermine the strength of their opinion, or they will be banned.
Great! This would convince me to use Twitter again.
Because of that I’d think the label would have to be applied to individual tweets and not to the profile.
I thought the same about Google Bot scraping websites, many websites would argue that this is universally good. In fact at Cloudflare the Google Bot was on a system wide allow list as it was "good" (in the older and now long deprecated original system years ago).
But "good" from one perspective isn't "good" from all perspectives, it's subjective.
Google Bot isn't good to the site that contains private information and launched too early and didn't yet have it's security in place and was scraped and the private exposed.
Bots are just machines, and machines aren't "good" or "bad", the actions they perform aren't even "good" or "bad"... it remains relative to each person as to whether they are good or bad.
Even with bots on Twitter, for some any bot is bad, or advertising bots are good, or they're bad. Creating the idea of a "blue tick for automated accounts" doesn't seem like the smartest move and just brings in the same problem that the blue tick has with humans.
I'm glad they're thinking about the problem, but a binary solution to a subjective and relative problem feels more like a regression than a step forward.
Calling this "known" bots would be a better thing, especially if tools to filter tweets by specific known bots existed.
What does Google have to do with this scenario? If someone puts their private information on the internet, then they shouldn't be surprised that their private information is on the internet.
“It’s information in public so someone might see” vs “Google continuously maximising the damage of a short term mistake, testing every door round the clock for accidental unlocks, because it’s in their financial interest”
If the internet is a hostile place where mistakes can harm you, the harm comes from the people acting in a hostile way rather than s friendly supportive way, and on this spectrum Google is the indifferent machine rather than the kindly human janitor exercising discretion and judgement.
It's going to change over time, sometimes quickly. Today bots made by individuals and labeled as bots that once per hour makes some clever markov speech tweet are good. Bots that spam reply to all tweets of a pattern and pretend to be humans are bad.
Battles will get fought in the very large grey zone but the entity that gets the final say on "good enough" is the owner.
So yeah I'm not optimistic about the future either.
1. User1 reads something that sounds pretty spammy from Bot1
2. Bot1 is not a “good bot” and thus doesn’t disclose that it is a bot.
3. User1 checks if spammy post was from a bot and sees that it’s not declared itself as one.
4. User1 then assumes that Bot1 is a human and trusts its Tweet more than it would have before the bot status was a thing.
/s
Even without the VPN, I occasionally have a bot that posts from a home machine with the same IP range as Tweetbot et al.
- RESTful APIs don't even expect a User-Agent
- User-Agent is customisable (ie bad bots can trivially use an array of seemingly authentic strings)
- Even Google are moving away from using User-Agent for identification.
As such, you can indeed spot bots through political agenda :)
1) Source IP range + number of accounts linked
2) interaction speed (some actions are too fast to be human, or show coordination like tweeting exact same tweet as a different account withing .2 seconds)
3) interaction times in a rolling window (individual humans need sleep, and usually around the same time)
4) IP packet fingerprinting: can flag discrepancies like a client seemingly tweeting from "Twitter for iPhone" but originating from a Linux/*BSD/windows host
It's an arms-race that I've fought on both sides of: deploying anti-abuse measures and writing a very well-behaved scraper; unfortunately some sites block all scrapers despite their behavior, and you have to figure out how the detection is done empirically and enjoy your short-lived victories while they last. On the defensive side, you continually have to update your detection heuristics, and the short-lived victories.
1. I also have a read-only Twitter archiving bot that doesn't hide its nature (the handle is "${NOUN}bot"). It runs from a single VPS at regular cron intervals. It'd be trivial for Twitter to detect this and make it not worth my while.
The behavior of concern here is Twitter accounts operating in service of somebody or something else, which might or might not be operated by a human, script, AI, or what have you. If they're operated by a human but the human's following its own script or administering a farm of puppet accounts, it'd still qualify even if the human gets to improvise on its message a bit.
A more accurate term might be 'agent', which also describes the day jobs of some of the people working on Twitter as their primary job :)
> Item 4 already happens on a large scale,
The article states that some people are skeptical about whether to trust tweets because they don’t know whether it’s a bot or not. My post was expanding off that premise saying an optional label doesn’t solve that problem, it makes it worse.
> The behavior of concern here is Twitter accounts operating in service of somebody or something else, which might or might not be operated by a human, script, AI, or what have you.
The article puts puppet accounts under the same umbrella as “bots”. My post was continuing on from that premise.
> A more accurate term might be 'agent',
Maybe, but arguing semantics completely misses the point of the discussion.
> which also describes the day jobs of some of the people working on Twitter as their primary job :)
We aren’t talking about people who work for Pizza Hut managing their Twitter presence. We are talking about large scale use of accounts pretending to be an average Joe but who are controlled by a single entity as part of a larger misinformation campaign. It might be a human who posts the messages but the person controlling those accounts aren’t the same as the accounts report themselves as and neither is there a 1:1 relationship between account and human. Calling them an “agent” legitimises it as if it’s people representing an organisation but it’s not, it’s effective still a network of bots except you’ve replaced software with “fleshware”.
I mean sure, if you want a different term to make the distinction then I have no issue with that. But the point of the discussion isn’t what do we name these types of accounts, it’s how do we make readers aware of when they’re reading an opinion vs an undercover piece of promotion. It’s kinds of similar to when some jurisdictions mandate that paid promotions need to be labelled as an advert rather than a review.
I've got no quarrel with anything you've said, except: item 4. In the parent post, your exact criticism was:
user reads info, user checks to see if it's labeled 'Officially A Bot', user does NOT find that label, and then item 4, user trusts info that harms them.
I'm sorry, I have a darker view of all this. The whole point is to push info (whether it's secret paid product promotion, political propaganda, or literal advocacy of genocide) into normalized social discussions and past any initial network of bots, and the whole point is that it's unreasonably effective on social networks where strangers can seem like 'friends'.
Obvious bots vs. surreptitious or human-controlled 'bots' is an almost meaningless distinction here. Also, you're correct in that 'agent' can be like a corporate 'registered agent' but also can imply 'secret agent', as in hostile foreign spy who doesn't have your best interests at heart. An intelligent operative trying to hurt you, not simply a 'robot' with no interests at all.
We're talking about and agreeing on all the same things. I'm saying the real key to managing the damage of this is not 'label things a bot', the real key is to broadly communicate the idea, 'this whole platform is trying to maximize social contagion and make you feel like large numbers of strangers are your trusted personal friends'.
And they're not, they're really, really not.
"As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people" (2017)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-ac...
"How Twitter Makes Money"
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-twi...
"Twitter by the Numbers"
https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/
"80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials." LOL
It seems to be related to using the new function which suggests that you follow a group of related people with one click, e.g. digital artists. Seems I followed too many people in a short period of time. Make up your mind, Twitter , do you want me to follow people or not?
I wonder if that tool is intentional bait. You don't actually know if Twitter itself is acting in good faith there, or if it's a trap: a tool seemingly made to help bot networks, but which would show Twitter exactly who fell for it and set up their bot networks with a few convenient (too convenient?) clicks.
It's a very interesting question, what side Twitter is on. I'm guessing it's on Twitter's side and Twitter's side alone, much like Facebook. If you're a bad actor and they're 'helping' you, it may be a trap.
These are obviously 'bad' bot accounts, but there's no indication of when, if ever, Twitter will get to them. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle such a scenario?
I have the word 'bot' in the description as well as the handle
It would be cool to get a friendly label
bad bots = republican bots and russian bots.
This is why I often use the term 'organic' to describe social media content that's not spurious. There's organic content, and that alone can be a handful.
Then there's stuff specifically cooked up to drive people into a frenzy and feed social hysteria, driving wedges and disrupting a targeted population. There is NO reason, on a publically available platform like Twitter, that the hostile content has to self-identify as the target group for manipulation. Provocation of outrage is often more effective by pretending to be a demographic marked for destruction, and then carrying on in an outrageous fashion for the benefit of angering onlookers.
And none of that is good, from any angle: not for general societal well-being. Unless you really like genocides and civil wars… which is where your Global Superpower Adversary bots come in, with an obvious and easy to understand agenda.
And that's where we're at, in this discussion.
Alt text, for those who (rightfully) don't want to click is, "I just left the ER. We are officially crushed by COVID..."
Three accounts posting the exact same thing.
"Sure, you caught us. What are you gonna do about it?"
This idea that there are “bot” accounts and “real” accounts is nonsense. Until AGI can create its own account, every account on Twitter is some real person posting, via some form of software.
You, sneak, are not that stupid. I've seen you posting before. I know you're not.
So honestly: What exactly are you trying to get at, here?
Another would be, "It looks like you are trying to plant the assumption that there are no possible Twitter users serving as puppets directed by others. Taking your statement at face value with best faith interpretation would lead to abandoning the whole discussion and trusting whatever goes on at Twitter to be just plain organic population, but we're pretty sure that's not the case. Why are you making statements that strongly suggest all of Twitter is just organic userbase, and minimizing the very thing we're talking about? We're literally talking about bots here.'
That's a lot wordier than 'I know you're not that stupid', and a lot less personal. Is it better? In some ways it implies the bot-minimizer is actively taking a role as a bad actor, not merely being foolish. I think such actors exist and also post on Hacker News and more or less everywhere else, but it's a nastier accusation and 'you're not that stupid, so what gives?' is a much gentler way of addressing it.
Especially when talking about use of, and restraint of, social media bot networks (AS THE PRIMARY TOPIC, I might add), we have to be able to talk about good faith and bad faith. It's literally the point of the whole discussion.
All of these "bot" accounts belong to a human being, and these human beings are posting on purpose (via their bot software).
0: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
If i were to use your definition, is the account created by an AGI not the same? The AGI, as with the automated script, was made by a person.
Sure, there will be some nuances where it's not so clear cut. But to say that there is no such concept of a "bot" is ridiculously misinformed about any of tech released in the last 30 years of electronic communication.
For now :)
Now take that into Twitter context. Can you claim that "I am a good tweet author" when I'm not the one who decides what's written on my feed but someone else? Can you even claim that you interacted with me personally at all?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/in-2016-microsofts-racist-chatbot-...