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Comment by AnEro | Hacker News Reader

I think this now is exposing a hidden advantage to having reasonable fees behind twitter/X API calls to read information. I haven't seen nearly as many research papers on user's posts in cybersecurity, so they just don't have the same avenue of people doing free work finding ways to combat AI generated profiles. Now that all has to be internal or enough of it to gain some trust back from government agencies and maybe the public.

Personally, finding ways to detect this is exactly the stuff that made me interested in the academic route of cybersecurity.

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Don't you mean that's a disadvantage? It used to be much easier for volunteer researchers to map out botnets and dissect influence campaigns in real time. Now you can't get at the Twitter streaming API unless you have $60,000/year or a search warrant.

Exactly - most people, including the parent poster, have never worked with a misinfo researcher

I'm saying it's an advantage since they publish their techniques, and you replicate it without having to do the research internally. It's better than this being dropped by a government agency or having most users notice that there are mostly only bots on the platform like they are now.

Regardless there is going to be bots and bad actors on your platform no one has enough money especially X to deal with them. A third party doing 80% of the work is an advantage, your reputation is already going to be tainted regardless

1) Whatever advantage there may be was completely wiped out by the decision to hand a blue checkmark to whoever would pay a couple of dollars, instead of doing a real identity verification.

2) When the perpetrator is a state, paywalls aren't all that effective as a deterrent. The ROI for the perpetrator is always going to be much higher than the ROI for whoever is trying to put the pieces together after the fact.

edit: I failed to understand that you were talking about benefit to X, not benefit to society. Gross.

Fair, this is coming from a place of trust my government to handle this stuff since X isn't going to. (Canadian) I agree with what you posted thats why:

1) I prefer open access and because of the reasons you posted, so others can hold the private company accountable

2) This is capitalism if they don't see profit they aren't going to do anything. So I think this is an interesting case for a pure profit/cost saving argument to have that open access to user posts.

3) social media as it is now is measurably bad for society even without propaganda

bonus) I like seeing how Elon, touted as a genius, has continuously fumbled X and somehow making it a more exaggerated place that he said it was before his purchase.

Funny you mention "trust in the government to handle this stuff" I was considering applying to this "canadian center for cyber security" but all the DEI upfront stuff and the fact that they are putting time and effort into "social media" turns me off real hard.

How do they expect tech nerds who want to work for some other reason than someone else's capitalism dream to settle for "monitoring social media" They need job postings mentioning "illegally hacking foreign hardware" or something

> completely wiped out by the decision to hand a blue checkmark to whoever would pay a couple of dollars

I personally thought this was clever at the time, but maybe I’m missing something.

By charging for the checkmark, it seemed like they took a short cut to “identity verification” that uses what we accept for our financial infrastructure as a baseline.

If you show up with a credit card bearing a name, either you are bamboozling the financial system or you are who you claim to be.

You can just buy a prepaid debit card at a supermarket and call yourself whoever you want.

When I got a blue checkmark it required a review period.

I’d assumed that the review involved checking the payment against the public profile.

This belief is reinforced by the observation that every change I’ve made to my public persona (name, profile picture, description) has resulted in a temporary loss of my blue check mark for a review process.

Maybe I misunderstood the nature of that review.

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