I think it's going to be more in the other direction.
He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.
Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.
He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.
Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.
The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).
You should be allowed to create your own client for any service you want, that is customized to your input needs.
Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care.
And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app.
I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.
That's horrible for users.
Twitter's iOS app is a third-party app they bought because it was so much better than their own at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie
The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence.
I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.
Hmm...this may turn into "Ban speech from my account that's promoting right/left wing agenda" moderation bots
Let the bot wars begin
On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats.
Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.
If you were to build a malicious bot, sure. If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.
Discord does something similar, although I feel they've gone way too far with policing it.
I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.
I don't think twitter is that place and it hasn't been for a while if it ever was.
I just watched this video again...
To me, the draw of twitter was you could text messages (SMS) to 40404 or get texts from 40404 from people I choose to follow. I had unlimited minutes and unlimited texts but I didn't have an app phone back in 2008 when I signed up for Twitter. The world has changed since then...
I'd say if you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you are probably better off setting up your own server to write blog posts or something like that? Maybe look into microdata or RSS or something too?
This is a Twitter account that started relatively recently - I like it. https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot
This sort of bot has had a good place on Twitter for at least a decade, going back to @everyword.
I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?
For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently.
Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script.
Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating.
These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.
In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.
News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference.
I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care.
In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift.
The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued.
That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well.
Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time.
PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
Please define your terms.
And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.
They simply factor them in as a cost of doing business.
When U.S. Presidential elections can be significantly swayed by information warfare campaigns run by malign actors, I can't help but feel that dismissals in such a context are rather aloof, if not out of touch.
[0] https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-dec...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/infamous-russian-troll-fa...
Facebook and Twitter have better funded research groups focusing just on the sub-task of knowing what my current state is (a necessary part of being able to tell if you've changed my preferences), and for advertising purposes I am categorised as being into nouns I don't recognise, foods and sports which repulse me, and so on.
I expect the three letter agencies to mix me up with the horror film director I share a name with, and also to confuse me with three pet dogs and two pet cats.
I can't imagine a Russian internet trolls with much a smaller reach and lower budget are going to be that much effective than best political ad minds of America at changing our opinions. (For Russian governmental organizational competency see Ukraine)
And then anecdotally I could have predicted every person's i knows vote a year before based on how they felt about woke culture and their party identification.
What degree of sway is up for debate, but given the documented scale and scope of the efforts, it certainly wasn't zero.
The public has been able to be swayed by media for a very long time. The CIA in particular has been deeply involved in it [0]. For some reason this was deemed okay, or at the very least acceptable, by the public. The only difference between the CIA controlled media cited and social media is the lack of US government control.
I do appreciate the irony here. That every other election was so-called "free and fair" yet an absolute wildcard gets in for 2016 and the deepest level of coping by every agency in the union was witnessed. I am not a fan of Trump, but if elections are truly "free and fair" then 2016 was legitimate. If 2016 wasn't legitimate, then why would anyone have any reason to believe 2020 was legitimate? I'm not intending to start a conspiracy theory fight here - but rather raise the question that is trying to be asked. If "foreign actors" elected a president in 2016, then whose to say they didn't in 2020? Or 2008? Or 2004? Who can you believe? I'd argue you couldn't believe any agency who might have an interest in having you believe otherwise. Maybe our elections are actually selections and in 2016 the powers that be lost the information war.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
1: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
As an external observer (full disclosure, conservative Brit) I deplore both those who try to malign the legitimacy of the 2016 result, and the 2020 result. Even so, I hold a special contempt in my heart for those Americans trying to excuse, justify or even in some cases explicitly encourage foreign covert influence on US elections and obstruct efforts to counteract it. Those people are not even borderline traitors and enemies of democracy, they’re all the way over the line. All IMHO, and it’s not my country.
But then there were investigations into the Russian election swaying campaign. I remember Facebook said that there was no evidence the ads they bought had any impact on anything[2]. There were also groups the trolls made. It's completely unclear what conclusion to draw from them.[3] The article says people mostly didn't follow the groups but that their posts reached people. What conclusion can be drawn from this? Is there any evidence the posts changed people's opinions? Also, one of the weird and counter intuitive things about it is they targeted left wing people.[4]
So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed. I didn't see it in those sources. I am not trying to make this a left/right thing. I am just saying that yes, there are bot and troll campaigns all over the place. But I don't know if we should conclude that they significantly swayed an election. It's just something to keep in mind. I brought up the China thing because I would think if it was actually a concern then people would have talked about it but how many knew that China, or Venezuela or Iran, were involved in this?
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-china/trump-...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2017/11/01/facebook-google-twitter-russi...
[3]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-facebook-russia...
Well, in my defense I did say can be swayed. However, I do think there was serious damage done when you take the full scope of Russian influence operations into account.[0]
That said, considering just the troll farm influence alone in an election scenario with tight margins—the 2000 election, for example—it's rather easy to see how it could make the difference.
It's taken seriously for good reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau.
Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.
And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot?
Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?
(Off topic, but I love the juxtaposition of your handle and the topic being discussed. :) )
It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.
there's yer problem, eh?
There are worse things in life than polite artifice. Maintaining it is, itself, an achievement.
If there's a flow that a human can go through to oauth with an application, then there's a way to bypass that same flow through a bot.
You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter.
So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.
I want to write a blog engine that posts a summary and a link to my twitter timeline automatically.
Do I have to "partner with Twitter"? How will that look?
But it also allows (even encourages) third party clients, which can act on behalf of ordinary users.
AwareOps tweets every time a solution goes down: https://twitter.com/awareops
Is that spamming bot stuff or useful or both?
How about the kid who wrote an app that tweets everyone position of a billionaire's airplane location?
That's the point.
> but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
What if I do this through Zapier? What about Hootsuite? Who's a BOT and who isn't?
It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th
https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/202...
I have not seen many obvious bot accounts using it, even the “good” ones.
IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.
Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it.
If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.
I'd be pretty surprised if those accounts were obviously using the API, too easy to ban them by application.
I would see bots as a major concern if you want to monetize the platform.
That term bot conflates at least three distinct meanings. Not sure how blocking the API would affect #2 or #3
1) Automated accounts probably using the API that are run by a program to post content. Can be benign. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/happyautomata/
2) Large accounts that push a particular point of view, often state sponsored, run in teams. Does not need an API. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/sprintermonitor
3) Small accounts paid to push or disrupt a particular agenda in replies. Often state sponsored. Example I suspect:
It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.
I think it's super simple actually. Wanna get a blue check-mark to prove you are human? Here, pay us 10$ pledge. You'll lose it, if you break the "rulez". Add financial frictions to the game, and bots strategy won't scale...
You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.
Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.
Yeah, good luck getting someone like the BBC to pay for embedding tweets.
> and take screenshots instead.
I'd assume that would be against TOS (probably is already.)
Until a court case says that the act of receiving bytes from an HTTP server constitutes agreement to a contract that was never even presented to you, it's hard to see how you can possibly have agreed to a TOS. The user must be presented with a TOS and have the option to reject it in order to have agreed to it.
In Hines v. Overstock.com, the court found Overstock.com’s browsewrap unenforceable because the website failed to prominently display the link to the online agreement in a way that would put users on notice of the website’s terms and conditions.
And if you think it's all because "you have to scroll to see the hyperlink" and that Twitter's one is valid because there's always a "Terms and Services" hyperlink in small text on the screen at all times, I can tell you of Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, in which the court held that Barnes & Noble’s browsewrap was unenforceable despite the fact that the hyperlink was prominently placed next to the buttons users must click in order to complete online purchases.
Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group also states:
> Because no affirmative action is required by the website user to agree to the terms of a contract other than his or her use of the website, the determination of the validity of a browsewrap contract depends on whether the user has actual or constructive knowledge of a website's terms and conditions.
In other words, w.r.t. the enforceability of Twitter's ToS on users that have never agreed to it explicitly, they have the burden of proof and have to give the court convincing proof that you knew about their ToS when you broke it.
This is all based on a rather obvious common law standard:
> An offeree, regardless of apparent manifestation of his consent, is not bound by inconspicuous contractual provisions of which he is unaware, contained in a document whose contractual nature is not obvious. - Specht v. Netscape
So yes, I have seen cases not enforcing this paradigm.
Sources:
Specht v. Netscape: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=958708515918483...
Hines v. Overstock.com: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163224540731670...
Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=110038111392175...
Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=174994243217056...
Embedding should be fine because that's being "published" by Twitter who you have already given permission to publish (cf [1]) although I'd have thought (IANAL) that a screenshot would be a good example of "fair use for commentary" except when e.g. news services embed tweets, they're often not commenting on those tweets specifically, just giving a general flavour of sentiment.
It's a minefield, probably.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/want-to-publi...
Maybe pay for no ads in the embeds?
He shut up about the bots as soon as it was evident the excuse wasn't working. Bots are of no concern otherwise.
Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.
Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.
Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.
How relevant is the API though?
Is it possible to put together a Selenium script that posts a tweet?
Instead of trying to maximize in-house value open ecosystem works better for Twitter.
That is what should change. The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers. Twitter the firm is infamously bad at improving anything, but this would be a way of recruiting a variety of capable parties into important efforts like fighting bots, spam, harassment, etc. Also there would be lots of money. This was obvious ten years ago.
> The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers
Paid reach is still ads, and narrowing free organic reach so that only the ads people are willing to pay for broad reach for have broad seeming-organic reach drops perceived content quality for consumers directly and reduces the perceived upside for the people creating and developing reach for organic content, getting them to put less effort in on your platform, further reducing consumer-perceived content quality.
Granted, insta posts are probably more valuable for Kardashian, but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.
Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.
If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that. Twitter should start charging the followed, only a little at first, on a sliding scale. They should try different pricing policies, for different users, and should keep adjusting until they have extracted a great deal of money from those twitter users with the most followers. It could be that some highly-followed users don't themselves see much value from their own tweets, so they won't want to pay. Twitter doesn't need those users; they're wasting resources. You may be worried about chasing away small users who will grow into big users, but small users won't be charged. By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
So does your argument.
> Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users.
Yes, it does, and that unique value is noncommercial organic content, which charging for organic reach undercuts.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
No, you are suggesting something just as bad: charging people for exactly what gives the followers a reason to be there.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
They are producing and providing Twitter with content which people are coming to Twitter to consume. That’s not “wasting resources”, that’s what enables Twitter to sell space to advertisers.
> By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
By the time they are even moderate-sized, they’ll be on multiple social platforms, be using each of them (among other things) to inform their followers of the others, and the kind of content they are distributing on them (especially as it changes), and will be, themselves, cobtinuously reevaluating the cost/benefit of each platform for particular content and adjusting their social media strategy.
Facebook uses this strategy, and as they dialed it up, big accounts did direct followers to other platforms to get reliable access to what they were producing.
> A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
How? Literally everything you’ve said applies to any large social media platform the same way as it applies to Twitter.
[0] https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1586430799884140545
Applicants need to be notable in fields such as government, entertainment, sports or political activism, and they need to abide by Twitter's rules including a ban on the glorification of violence. [0]
Which probably means one can get a checkmark if one pays the right PR firm, who kick back to the right twitter middle manager, but twitter shareholders don't get a cut. Twitter has completely ignored an obvious source of revenue for its entire existence.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-verificati...