I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, but it worked for weeks without Twitter doing anything.
I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...
This is a great effort. I wrote about this at the end of January (https://research.satnam.co/2018/01/30/scammers-impersonating...) and was working on a script last month that did the same thing but I was searching the Streaming API for specific keywords that I knew were triggers for their tweets. I set-up a Twitter account to also identify and report these scammers accounts. The problem I was having was I did not account for the variety of currencies that were being utilized, so I had to write new regexes for the different address types. By then, they had switched up tactics and I hadn't followed up on it since.
The profile of fake porn accounts the guy in the first part of the story developed is that they "liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios."
If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.
But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.
So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b.
I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)
I have an account like that. I just retweet and like stuff sort of like a public bookmarking system. I just go through them when I get enough leisure. I wonder if having a profile photo would help avoiding false positives.
Well, they're obviously not the only criteria, as the text you mention was immediately preceded by "Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts... "
We have so many better systems with tons of literature. We -- us, the humans in bulk, as a species with brains -- have so, so many things figured out for this.
Googling for "random walk" and "sybil attack" will dump so many solid research papers in our laps it's just a tragedy nobody can be arsed to do something useful.
This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.
I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.
I upvoted because I assume you meant that verification would be optional. I believe Twitter is actually moving toward that solution.
I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.
I couldn't agree more. If there are more accounts than people in a region, you know you have robots registering. They need to employ better captcha and verification for registering new accounts.
I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.
I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.
If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams.
Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
"n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida."
They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.
This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
In the early days of twitter, Trust&Safety was considered the second-lowest team on the totem pole of engineering career advancement possibilities (sorry Internal Tools aka Developer Productivity).
I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations.
Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.
Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have already engineered.
I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.
> it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it?
Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)
It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.
I just hope something similar to a follow graph/follow range comes up as a solution. It gives _way_ more control to individuals to limit the reach of bad actors.
I frankly don't use twitter much anyway... I mostly post things that I like, and in the end use my own account to re-find stuff I posted later... it's a bad bookmark manager is how I use it, but at least then other people might find it useful to.
This whole bot thing is turning into a classic hysteria.
I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'.
There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1].
There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating.
The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media).
[1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
They report them. And then nothing happens because its in the interest of Twitter's business to not do anything about it.
To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users.
I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.
[+] [-] lorenzhs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigiain|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sat_nam|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1337biz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|8 years ago|reply
If that is the only criteria he's using, many legitimate accounts will be falsely accused.
[+] [-] jeffwass|8 years ago|reply
But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me.
So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b.
I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)
[+] [-] abhishekjha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuartd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavenlyhash|8 years ago|reply
Googling for "random walk" and "sybil attack" will dump so many solid research papers in our laps it's just a tragedy nobody can be arsed to do something useful.
[+] [-] aphextron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spdustin|8 years ago|reply
I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.
[+] [-] JonasJSchreiber|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.
I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.
[+] [-] jonny_eh|8 years ago|reply
And you should be able to filter out posts accordingly, like "only showed verified" or "don't show suspected bots".
And by default, Twitter should hide suspected bots in reply/hashtag threads, so they don't get increased exposure.
[+] [-] dbetteridge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bond|8 years ago|reply
https://selfkey.org/
[+] [-] duxup|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bossx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtokoph|8 years ago|reply
I guess they might pollute search results? Is there something else I'm missing?
[+] [-] TheSmiddy|8 years ago|reply
Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"
[+] [-] hellbanner|8 years ago|reply
"n October, Twitter’s general counsel told a Senate committee investigating disinformation that Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the run-up to the last presidential election, and such bots would later be implicated in hundreds of tweets that followed a school shooting in Florida."
some of these bots, were not bots btw
[+] [-] itomato|8 years ago|reply
It's trivial to boost the apparent "credibility" of a given account with followers, likes, and retweets.
There is essentially no barrier to exploiting these "commodities" with networks of bots artificially boosting these stats.
Soon, the synthesized noise from bot accounts drowns out the organic signal of genuine accounts.
Waves of content reverberate through the Twittersphere, into and from other channels like 4chan, Facebook and Instagram.
[+] [-] orng|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obblekk|8 years ago|reply
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
[+] [-] johnc1231|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzrdude|8 years ago|reply
I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish.
Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.
[+] [-] staticelf|8 years ago|reply
I didn't tweet anything, just followed some people I found interesting.
I don't want to verify my phone number. Fuck you twitter.
[+] [-] nasredin|8 years ago|reply
(Not giving Twitter my phone number)
I think it's deliberate b/c bots seem to be exempt from this phone number requirement.
[+] [-] extweep|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure that's changed recently, but IMO a lot of the trouble that Twitter/FB/Reddit have had with bots has to do with trying to get good engineers rationally interested in being part of T&S organizations.
Now T&S is sexy, but there's got to be lag time effectively changing the leadership and team structures of these large, established teams.
[+] [-] jordan801|8 years ago|reply
I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|8 years ago|reply
Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)
It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fabianhjr|8 years ago|reply
For example: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...
[+] [-] Aissen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
I really hope it doesn't end up harming a bunch of the 'good guys' like most of the quickly assembled shoddy 'solutions' most public hysterias generate, rather than stopping the legit 'bad guys'.
There have been countless examples of well-intentioned but heavy-handed intervention being a net-negative for society [1].
There could very well be some really interesting legitimately useful bots that will get swept up in this. Or platform limitations added which cripple the utility of all bots...with some an unmeasurable potential loss via future bots which were never created as a result. ....Meanwhile the 'bad guys' find a hundred loop holes to keep operating.
The key is keeping this to a case-by-case enforcement...whether at an individual or specific use-case based level. Not some overarching limitation or stigmatization of bots (across all social media).
[1] See: the drug war, 1970s NYC/Toronto rent control laws resulting in a far lower supply of affordable housing and more dilapidated tenements, anti-oil pipeline activism resulting in more environmental harm via rail and truck transit, pro-poverty housing regulation creating isolated urban ghettos, wage laws reducing total long-term net income for all low-income workers than it gains employed workers in the short term, etc, etc.
[+] [-] makomk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goerz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lokedhs|8 years ago|reply
To be fair, I'm sure some will be blocked but the problem with Twitter bots is that the only way to get rid of the problem is to ignore false positives. That will fix the issue but replace it with a different problem, as it clearly won't make for happy users.
I've been using Mastodon quite heavily recently and the "ban first" approach is taken by many instances. They can do that since the network is decentralised. Twitter, on the other hand can't do the same thing.
[+] [-] nsaaass|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuespetre|8 years ago|reply
What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.
[+] [-] YTGRK|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] orbitingpluto|8 years ago|reply
This obviously conflicts with Twitter's incentive to maximize their profit and brand. So the next obvious solutions are token measures.
edit: And apparently to downvote anyone who calls them out.