
Measuring Traffic Manipulation on Twitter - DyslexicAtheist
https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/working-papers/twitter-traffic-manipulation/
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keyle
This was really interesting and it gives a fairly easy setup for catching
blatant botnets manipulating social medias.

I don't understand how the platform owners don't put a stop to this when it's
this easy to detect.

I guess engagement is a key metric that looks good to shareholders and
advertisers.

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B-Con
The problem is similar to bots in gaming. Banning bots predictably gives the
attacker (bot builder) clear success/failure signals for evading detection,
then it becomes a detect-vs-evade arms race that the bot builders will likely
win.

Detecting and monitoring the bots provides a possibly similar outcome, but t
with the advantage that he platform knows the bots. If there are bots with
way, the platform would probably prefer the option that allowes them to know
who the bots are.

The middle ground is basic auto detection/bans for simple abuse and infrequent
ban waves for the rest, where bots are detected and all banned together. This
makes it hard for the writers to understand which signals have them away and
gives them the disincentive of uncertainty. This is popular in gaming, where
bot and cheat farms are detected and studied by they platform for up to
several months before bans are handed out.

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meowface
Another issue is punishment. Ideally, if a particular user paid a bot service
to add 100k new followers to their profile, not only the bots but the
manipulative user should be banned.

But there's no way for Twitter (or any other platform) to determine who's
actually responsible. "False flags" (framing a user by buying followers for
them, or running bots themselves to follow them) are not uncommon, so the best
Twitter can do is remove the followers and improve bot detection capabilities.
This lets users continually pay for more bots to replenish their periodically
purged follower count.

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aboutruby
The most interesting are coordinated human and machine traffic manipulation

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priansh
How does this account for "reputation"? I know that, to avoid flagging new
users, most platforms use reputation based algorithms that rate users based on
their internet activity prior.

