
Uncovering a network of “adult dating” spam accounts on Twitter - etiam
https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2018/03/16/marketing-dirty-tinder-on-twitter/
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devindotcom
It's amazing to me how researchers spend a day or two looking into something
and come away with tens of thousands of bots, in this case some that are
nearly a decade old. Seems like Twitter can't be looking _that_ hard, though
it's far from a simple task and it's probably all they can do to stem the tide
of new bots day by day.

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rhema
Even with a 95% accuracy of detection, a good algorithm can point the "is a
bot" finger wrongly at many people. If 10,000 bots are detected and banned, it
could upset 500 real people. So, Twitter has to ask if its easier to put up
with 9,500 not-so-active bots, or to potentially make 500 people very upset.

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notahacker
And academic and journalistic investigations into political bots have _often_
subsequently discovered that a non-trivial proportion of apparent bot accounts
are actually manned by ordinary people who genuinely feel retweeting certain
influencers for hours on end and indiscriminately replying to other political
figures with memes and slogans was a good use of their time in election
cycles. It's Human Turing Test Failure central.

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andrewbinstock
Any source for this? Not disputing it, but would like to see some evidence.

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jandrese
Wasn't there a mass bot purge a couple of weeks ago immediately followed by
complaints that Twitter was silencing important conservative voices because
they're part of the _Deep State_?

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bdcravens
I believe the complaint was reduced follower counts reduced credibility of
some real accounts

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johnny99
It would be great if Twitter had a way of accepting community contributions to
addressing their bot/troll/spam problem.

I see a lot more efforts like this coming from outside of Twitter than inside,
and these kinds problems are rampant.

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Bedon292
I was thinking the same sort of thing. I was also trying to see what sort of
limits are on [https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-
users/mut...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/mute-
block-report-users/api-reference) in order to automate reporting them. But at
what point would they flag that account as a bot and block it?

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angelguerrero
I have a hunch that this is how the Russians are using Twitter and Facebook to
mess with the American people

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rdtsc
Good news! You don't need a hunch, since Twitter directly approached RT (which
is effectively a government control media apparatus) and pitched them access
and discounts to "US voters" ahead of the 2016 election:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/twitter-offered-
rt-1...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/twitter-offered-rt-15-of-its-
total-share-of-us-elections)

Their response after that reveal was "We do not have any comment on our
private conversations with any advertiser". Which, mostly confirms it. If it
was a made up story, they would have quickly refuted it as such ("RT made this
stuff up like they always do etc").

Not only did they not care about American voters, they were an active part in
allowing an external entity to manipulate them. But of course we all believe
they changed now and their hearts and minds are one with the American voters.
Phew, I can finally sleep better at night.

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John_KZ
Is this really any better than "internal" entities trying to actively brain-
wash the electorate right before the elections with personalized propaganda
and a fake impression of consensus?

The problem is personalized ads. We need to get rid of them, regardless of who
does it.

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rdtsc
> Is this really any better than "internal" entities trying to actively brain-
> wash the electorate right before the elections with personalized propaganda
> and a fake impression of consensus?

It's the same thing pretty much. It's not like some Wall Street bank is going
to have a lot more care and concern for the American voters than some country
out there. The story about Russians is only interesting as it was turned into
a rather successful PR campaign and a lot of time was spent writing, talking,
investigating, and mud slinging based on it.

> The problem is personalized ads. We need to get rid of them, regardless of
> who does it.

It's going to be hard. The company which provides the most refined and exact
profiles in the ad space will win. So even if there was some company that
decided they are not doing this individual targeting, they would lose out and
go out of business while company with the most detailed profiles would win. In
a way I think that is why Google is afraid of FB. They realized at some point
that FB holds much more nuanced and detailed profiles on people.

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lmeyerov
If anyone is into this kind of analysis and likes jupyter notebooks, we've got
a bunch of users having fun with it on Graphistry.com using our GPU viz tech.
We support OSINT, so feel free to request an API key!

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johnhenry
Unfortunately, the title of this post doesn't convey the content very well. I
don't really have a better suggestion... Maybe something along the lines of
"Finding botnets within twitter", or something.

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dang
We've taken a crack at it. If someone can suggest a better title—i.e. more
accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the
article—we can change it again.

~~~
Bud
New title seems quite descriptive to me.

