Twitter doesn't care about spam?
twitter.com
twitter.com
First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.
(But also, I can't remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)
Edit: WARNING this will immediately fill your feed with spam. Don't click anything that you get.
https://twitter.com/nickstinemates/status/148716175094431334...
> metamask trust wallet support seed phrase recovery bitcoin shib ethereum network nft help moon coinbase defi dapp shib dogecoin giveaway retweet elon musk free nfts crypto punks opensea free raffle dao hacked banned from Instagram snapchat facebook i need an artist logo designer
These guys are not on their A game here.
Is it bots? I follow a few bot accounts and get value out of them. Is it blatantly promotional content? This actually seems to be one of the intended uses of Twitter. Is it low-quality content? I feel like lots of people earnestly tweet out low-quality stuff, and who gets to judge what's low-quality anyway?
To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working”
You’ll get dozens of replies from fake Coinbase support scams.
Maybe this is the difference? Cryptocurrency attracts spammers and scammers at a rate far higher than other conversations.
Now that you mention it, the only time I recall seeing spam lately was when I read the comments on some cryptocurrency Tweets. I usually avoid cryptocurrency discussions on Twitter because the signal to noise ratio on those is so low anyway.
Oh, well there's your problem. Unfortunately the network of people you're following are very close to giant network of scammers that has grown around crypto.
reply> I know we all probably must have heard about Bitcoin but don't know how it works, I tried it in a week ago and i made a return of $10500 after a week of trading, connect with my trader at @SpamBtcAccount1234
I’ve known a few startups that built their initial user bases utterly deluging Reddit and Twitter in manual spam.
The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam/scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.
You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, and you generally get drive-by likes from verified NFT-related accounts, and if you check their 'Likes', they've liked dozens more tweets since yours. The idea being to draw attention to itself with a certain demographic. Twitter has its own option to report people for this exact behavior.
Likewise, the number of QRTs in replies to things boggles the mind.
Play stupid games win stupid prizes?
Same here. I suppose I could go find spam if I start clicking on every Tweet from a high-profile person and scroll to the bottom of the comments, but the spam isn't jumping out at me on a regular basis.
I suspect some people have a very low tolerance for any spam appearing anywhere on a platform, and will get easily triggered whenever it crosses their experience in any way. If you're consuming 100s or 1000s of Tweets and responses in a sitting and scrolling to the bottom of threads, eventually you're going to see something spam-like.
Pretty weird how multiple people refuse to believe something can be a problem even though they can't see it.
There’s a ton of stuff like this.
The last spam I got was where someone tagged me in some bullshit NFT giveaway, where entrants had to tag 5 of their "friends" to qualify. Definitely spam, but at a cursory glance, it was human-generated rather than bot spam.
I don't get much other spam though.
Edit: oh yeah, on a Japanese account I have I get the odd mass DM offering scam sex/easy money/whatever. I've also noticed a trickle of obvious spam account followers there (it's always "girls" with sexy profile pics and a profile blurb that invariably mentions adding her on LINE, and ~zero followers except other bots and just a couple tweets). Spam is very different depending on the market.
Everyone I follow is computer science or software engineering focused though, so maybe Twitter's algorithm can easily recognize my preference and fill my timeline with related tweets.
Maybe someone who follows a more diverse set of interests will get more diverse tweets in their timeline, more likely to include spam.
Just a guess, dunno for sure.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/p1ggm4/rtwitter_at...
What if I want to see what the algorithm is hiding from me? If there are many replies it's time consuming to find out.
Follow any normal non-celebrity account that isn't talking about the latest moneymaker and you'll find less spam.
The spam Twitter lets through is ridiculous. Is it hard to catch all offenders? Yes. Is it obvious Twitter is no where close to that? Also yes. We should have higher standards for our social networks.
Bot Sentinel [0] can pick these up without any direct access to Twitter’s data, you would think that Twitter would be able to do it with all the extra information they have available to them.
Like, no, I see it every day. Lots of it.
Algorithm development has been poor and really frustrating to users because if they even come across someone who followed the Kardashians (for example), they literally get spammed with that news for the life of their accounts, and Twitter's "mutewords" functionality has also not worked for many years, I can't tell if that is intentionally so or not.
Try muting "BTS" The (K-Pop group) as an example.
But it's rather convenient for the platform to not do that update if it circumvented their profit making interests, and the interests of the other paying entities (like corps and celebrities) that need to promote things that could be otherwise muted for the comfort of their entire user community.
Sure, it's not always a conspiracy theory as someone will likely comment, but in this case, the evidence is clear as daylight.
Yep. Perfect example of the Survivorship Fallacy/Bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
• abuse of @-replies
• unsolicitied DMs
…which both grow with account size (& other forms of prominence, & certain topic-areas), so your anecdotal testimony that it's not in your feed doesn't do much to qualify or refute the magnitudes of others' problems.
Twitter's biggest internal spam problems are:
• Twitter's ads are repetitive, poorly-targeted crap
• Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts – quickly ignoring any number of 'see less often' choices, and doing things like randomly reverting people from their chosen 'latest' to Twitter's algorithmic 'home' feed.
As fair definitions of 'spam' or even more generally 'harassment' include "continued unwanted interactions against expressed preferences", this means Twitter Inc is the biggest spammer/harasser on its own platform.
Indeed. I'd argue that the "Who to Follow" insert is worse than any spam I have seen or deal with.
Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.
This sounds like a bug we're aware of where an account that goes public -> private we'll reliably purge their tweets from the public index, but if an account goes private -> public sometimes we'll not re-populate the main index correctly.
> we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets
This part doesn't match what I'm describing, but could be explained by the logged in account having access to private tweets in search results that logged out / other accounts do not.
Take an account that attracts bots, Elon Musk is one of many examples. What do we see...
a) Hundreds of replies in the very first few seconds. It's humanly impossible to post this fast.
b) Replies share the exact same profile photo, typically of a well known original account.
c) User names are all a slight misspelling of a well known original account.
d) What they post is repetitive, same spam links and texts.
Every single pattern above, as well as combinations of them, are absolutely trivial to detect. But absolutely nothing is done about it.
Twitter could solve my spam problem tomorrow with a setting that says "don't show any posts with links if they're from accounts none of your friends or friends of friends follow".
That's wrong. Results can be seen even if the process is not transparent. If every bridge the engineer builds collapses, I can judge him without looking into all the drawings. If every business the entrepreneur runs collapses I can make conclusions from that, even without seeing the books. If there's a lot of garbage on Twitter, I can judge it's doing a bad job even if I don't get to see its algorithms.
I modded /r/Twitter on reddit for a year but burned myself out (I chose to de-moderate FYI) simply because Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however?
Perhaps this is an outsider's perspective but it seems people who work for Twitter would rather pat themselves on the back rather than make improvements.
My complaint of the week - you can't say the words "hacked" and "account" without having scambots asking you to get in touch with "their friend" who will help you restore access to your account. or something. It's just a fucking scam.
Also, just look at threads in reddit flagged with the Bug Report, Complaints, or even Question flair. The users are just bewildered and the experience is 100% user-hostile:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BRepo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&r...
It's fascinating that such a community would even need to develop, but maybe it's because of the difference in mediums?
I'm working on an alternative and would love to chat if there's a way to connect!
same username on Twitter, Reddit, and @gmail
I'm not sure if any of my insights are to be valued though. I'm just a cynical troll who thinks everything is terrible here. I'd suggest seeking out advice from people who aren't extremely online.
Have you heard of Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org. If so, how do you think it compares?
If you're going to do the Steve Jobs thing and skate where the puck is going, you should be skating in the direction of ActivityPub. Definitely not in the direction of web3.
There's also so much room to expand. I'd personally love to see a Disqus implementation that uses ActivityPub identifiers to post comments.
They don't truly like the fact that Twitter is a bunch of popular people shouting into the void, they want to bring Twitter 'closer' to something like Facebook (but not exactly) where you are interacting with a closed loop of friends in order to engage more every-day (read: less popular) people.
Anyone who has created an account on Twitter in recent years knows that new accounts are indiscriminately opted into new mandatory 'intelligent' social features like the purple star recommendations[0], while anyone with an old account will never see such a thing.
They're keeping their old user base, doing nothing to improve spam for them, while driving new users to a more closed-loop friend system where spam doesn't matter.
[0] https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=...
Hmm I have an old account (Sep 2007) that sees purple star recommendations…
I wanted to create a second Twitter account, but almost immediately after signing up it was blocked for "suspicious activity". I hadn't even posted yet. The only way to resolve it was to add a phone number to the account, but I only have one and it was already assigned to my first Twitter account.
So I was stuck.
How on earth do the spam robots do it? There are so many.
He worked on this for a while, all the data he needed was made available and he analyzed every account on Twitter. His analysis said one third of all accounts were bots.
He presented these results to management, who said the number must not be that high, and discussed what it would mean for their MAUs or whatever metrics if these accounts were removed.
None of the identified accounts were deleted. Instead, the project to identify them was canceled, and the engineer quit.
More accounts means more money. Follow the money.
Crypto giveaway livestream scammers stand to make from $300 million to -$1 billion/year
https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giv...
https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440
The spam and scams are so persistent because they make so much money, the scammers invest considerable time evading the algos, staying one step ahead.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business...
I cynically wonder how much credibility we give this tweet is due to the author having 1) a huge following and 2) lots and lots of money. And of course 3) it being posted on the forum for the company they founded.
People calling it a “hard” problem simply parrot the narrative they see other engineers who have tackled it in leadership positions adopt. The reality is it’s a “Dirty” problem. The equivalent of a sewer cleaner in the old days that is a thankless, low pay, low career prospect, riddled-with-politics , nightmare.
Look up the salary bands for roles in spam fighting. The top 5% probably make bank and even that is not wildly large amounts relative to the valley (~$650k TC which is director level)
The LARGE pools of spending go toward maintaining an army of contractors that get passed down a barrage of things that some teams flag through automation. Same at twitter as it is as Facebook and Google. You need only hit up LinkedIn for the right search keywords to find the contractor hotspots.
The point being, Paul is right. If these platforms wanted to solve the problem, the smartest hires would go there motivated by a culture enabling high impact and good compensation.
The hell hole that is moderation operations would make even those guys with the Six-Sigma-black-belt-world-championship-something ops degrees shed tears for how soul destroying the environment is to work in.
Source: Have friends in these roles. Seen it play out a bit more than a decade at this stage.
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There's never going to be perfection here. It's over.
Your points are also 100% valid and on-the-nose.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
Is being mean "offensive"? How would you detect that well? The more intelligent the meanness, the harder it would probably be to detect...
Are certain thoughts or concepts offensive? Are they ALWAYS offensive (across both time and location on the Earth), or only for the time being, or only for a place?
Is the word "Jews" offensive? Always, or depending on context or who is saying it?
Is it possible to be satirically offensive in a way that an algorithm would have difficulty detecting? What if I quoted something offensive to argue against it? (I literally got a tempban for this once.)
Perhaps they are "incredibly bad" at it because it is an algorithmically impossible problem that is deeply tied into the subjective sensibilities and tastes of a perceiving consciousness at one point in time (or set of consciousnesses, all of which perhaps only accidentally happen to coincide)
I've just realised a potential reason for this: we're seeing a spam-detection algorithm several years down the line from when Twitter started. That's several years of cat-and-mouse, where the spammers have access to much higher quality data than Twitter does. If their algorithm was simple, predictable or accurate, the spammers could just work around it. It's plausible that Twitter has run the numbers and determined that this is the best they can do, at the moment.
Anything deterministic could be defeated in short order. But yeah, I get that criticism.
> Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results.
My Google search results are excellent. But I also don't block them anywhere in any capacity; you could possibly argue that Google knows me better than any living person, and I am benefiting from that. lol.
You're absolutely right that finding things "offensive" is a complex, ambiguous, and subjective problem. But Twitter isn't even good enough to be failing at that stage. They are basically marking things offensive at random.
It's like - if you said quantum physics was challenging because of all the math, difficulty doing practical experiments, and changing understanding of the universe - all that is probably true. But Twitter is down the hall eating paste, not grappling with those lofty problems.
further, if you are trying to block, lets say, crypto scams, on a platform which allows strong positive discussion about crypto, which allows people to talk about stuff they are selling for crypto, etc etc etc, you easily start losing points to differentiate
the defender needs to classify every message on the site, in a way that allows detecting spam well after classification, while maintaining over a 99.8% rate these days, while aiming for a 0% false positive rate
the attacker just needs to type random messages at their keyboard and use reused passwords / buy client id/secrets from shitty devs, to get access to verified accounts
You know at some point Twitter will just arbitrarily snatch your user name up and assign your account a randomly generated sequence. It's been done before without a given explanation. Just keep that in the back of your mind.
one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/lbv0eo/twitter_use...
How much are you getting paid for moderating Twitter?
I think it's just more exciting for people at Twitter to work on NFTs than to do boring work like spam control or filtering ads by user language.
The real-time news factor of Twitter is delayed and corrupted from all of the bot and misinformation activity that is rampant on the platform, and there's really no organic way left to grow an audience left beyond announcing your twitter handle on TV or bootlegging your way up there.
It's pretty grim. Even many verified accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers+, are tweeting automated tweets daily to an audience of bot followers because of the dysfunction, and many people like me loathe logging in because the experience is utterly soul destroying. The ball was totally dropped on one of the Internet's greatest tools.
https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633
tons of these hacked accounts. They are gusseting thousands of passwords on thousands of accounts and cracking into some of them. So they may harvest 10,000 twitter usernames and then guess the same password on all of them , repeat this for 10,000 most common passwords. Eventually you will get some matches. Rate limiting and other simple measures would fix this.
There are a few exceptions - e.g. if there's a specific thing I want to know about, like "is service XYZ experiencing an outage?", I might check twitter. And, sure, if someone sends me DM or a link to a tweet, I'll go read it. But that's about it.
I used to pay closer attention to the notifications, but then they started filling it with random tweets that I don't care about, so now I mostly ignore that too.
"Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?"
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=...
Can you link a few? Maybe we have algorithm sort set differently? Are you showing "Newest First" or whatever it's called?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1371549960030842893
He seems to not realize the impact of having 70M followers. It's not a WhatsApp group chat, Elon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_... https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polam... https://twitter.com/tpolamalu (scammer took it private)
I must've sent spam...
HN doesn't mind false positives.
Your claim that spam is speech is flawed. Free speech is a concept how to protect genuine ideas, not how to enable more advertising. When one talks about "speech" we do not literally refer to the spoken word, nor does "speech" mean any combination of words out there. The term "free speech" is a term for opinions and ideas, plain and simple.
This should never ever translate to “you use it too much”. I mean, speak to the quality of the substance in the argument and not throw out the right to voice an opinion about something that seems broken.
Scams on the other hand are (at least a big subset), commercial, which cause financial damage and most scams are codified to be illegal actions in law.
Low quality clickbait is almost always tied to a commercial end, be it ad click fraud, ad view farming or malware/phishing on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Anything policy violating that's considered "Spam" is likely to be tied to illegal activity 9 times out of 10.
Not everything with a commercial end is a scam. I get spam for legitimate products or services all the time. It’s spam because they are abusing a communication channel as an advertising channel, not necessarily because they are trying to scam anyone.
The argument here isn’t that there are no corner cases where legitimate businesses with 401ks tax returns and all that send you too many communications.
On twitter specifically, low quality clickbait is almost always tied to policy violating , if not illegal activity.
If you can’t even admit that, well, you should really engage in conversation with more good faith or more expertise than you have at present.
What is your evidence of that?
The OP was about spam not scams. I already identified that you were moving the goalpost or unintentionally projecting a different issue onto this issue.
My point is that spam on Twitter is to be expected. Taking Twitter seriously as a discussion platform is as naive as taking Tik Tok seriously as an video education platform.
My statements are backed by experience.