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Comment by Markoff | Hacker News Reader

I find much more interesting how Twitter is now flooded with accounts which are suddenly posting NSFW escort tweets containing Chinese city names in Chinese characters and one account is able to post 3000 tweets in 24 hours to flood search results with nonsense.

https://twitter.com/dong_mengyu/status/1596749168462401536

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That's a state-sponsored attack.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter...

Attack? The Chinese communist government is merely exercising their freedom of speech. /s

No surprise, the new CEO fired the team responsible for detecting and taking down bot accounts. Previously these teams were taking down 500,000 bot accounts every day, which suggests that Twitter might be accumulating 3.5M bot accounts every week.

That seems like an over-estimate. Presumably if you stop taking bots down, they do not re-appear as fast?

In my experience bot-busting on other (admittedly smaller) platforms, it's almost certainly very skewed towards new accounts. I would estimate accounts less than one week old accounts make up 80+% of that number.

That said, I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that because Twitter fired that team their bot-busting capability instantly dropped from 500k/day to zero/day. The code they wrote and the work they did still exists.

I'm sure something of the sort would have happened without him. But he's not the type to do anything in response to this or confront CCP with the regular praise he heaps on them. He even said Taiwan should be part of China like HK.

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