
College Kids Doing What Twitter Won't - denzil_correa
https://www.wired.com/story/the-college-kids-doing-what-twitter-wont/?mbid=nl_11117_backchannel_p1
======
nunobrito
So much bias on that article against Russia, falsely gives the idea that
Russia was the major actor pushing artificial tweets.

Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time
that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters
instead of being identified as paid comments:
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-
hill...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hillary-
clinton-correct-the-record/)

This is a perversion of democracy, not even taking weight the proven federal
crimes to which this former presidential candidate seems immune.

The means to bring back balance to democracy are certainly in our hands. This
also includes exposing what is wrong with the upper echelons of western
society.

~~~
vkou
> Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time
> that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters
> instead of being identified as paid comments

You do understand how campaigning works, right?

Not how you want it to work, but how it actually works.

~~~
handedness
Astroturfing is a different thing, yes, but it's still a thing nonetheless.

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s17n
They made a ML model to identify twitter bots.

To get their training data, they identified 100 accounts that appeared to be
bots, and then assumed that all their followers were also bots. They used
verified accounts as their sample of non-bot accounts.

They claim they "identify bots 93.5 percent of the time." No data is given
about false positives.

~~~
donmatito
While your comment certainly points a flaw in their approach, it is not
something that cannot be addressed with a little bit of manpower/insider
knowledge/more data.

They have demonstrated a proof of concept that hunting bots on Twitter can be
achieved, and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted

~~~
dmix
Having false positives are quite serious though, especially when it comes to
shutting accounts down at scale. Sure it works on their small sample test
runs, but anyone who's applied these algorithms in real life in an automated
fashion understand the risks of false positives is usually far higher in
practice.

You will basically be put at risk for following 'controversial' accounts on
Twitter of having your account delete accidentally. And businesses will have
to jump through bureaucratic hoops to use legitimate automated scripts to
manage accounts.

It also seriously deters anonymous online speech if they force a big
percentage of users to provide a unique phone number to prove they aren't a
bot (the current Twitter strategy for countering spam). Not to mention the
liberal sharing of information with nation states, surreptitiously or
otherwise, even for people not trying to be anonymous. A phone number is a
critical identifier in the surveillance industry.

Getting this accurate is very important and I feel like that is being heavily
downplayed in this article.

~~~
lukasschwab
Deletion isn't the only option for escalation; Twitter could assemble a risk
factor for a given account and opt to present captchas, for example, rather
than automatically deleting. Scale captcha frequency with the risk factor.

Captchas are certainly not foolproof, but they up the difficulty of running a
huge number of phony accounts while having a minimal impact on normal Twitter
usage.

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giarc
I can't help but think of a story (and a company) that helps people out when
they can't escape a bad Google search result. For example, you search Bill
Smith and only bad things come up.

For a long time, the play book to improve your online reputation was to get
rid of those bad links. However, a company (and I can't remember the name)
decided it might be easier to just create better links/stories about the
person and let google bury the bad stuff. Therefore when someone searches Bill
Smith, they see the good stuff.

Anyways - back to the topic at hand here. Perhaps the solution to these bad
bots isn't to try and stop them, but to build better bots that spread
#realnews and aren't as toxic? Maybe it wouldn't work, clickbait and catchy
headlines are more "share worthy" than the latest WSJ front page article, but
maybe we need a new strategy?

~~~
weavie
Can #realnews actually exist in a completely objective and non toxic manner?

~~~
JamesBarney
I honestly think this postmodernist take that equates TheHill with the New
York Times, and Breitbart with the Wall Street Journal is toxic.

There is a such thing as journalistic integrity, it is possessed in wildly
different amounts by different news sources and it matters. A lot.

~~~
malvosenior
I don’t think it’s toxic to apply the utmost scrutiny to outlets like NYT.
There have been many events that have demonstrated their decided lack of
journalistic integrity (silently editing articles after publication, overt
bias, playing with release timing...).

The internet has broken mainstream media’s monopoly on “the truth” so it seems
a natural next step that they are viewed objectively based on their actions
instead of their perceived and heavily marketed position of authority.

Postmodernism itself is the byproduct of the Information Age giving people
access to multiple viewpoints. I’m glad to see the playing field leveled.

~~~
vkou
Unfortunately, it's been leveled so much, we're below sea level.

I despise propaganda as much as... Well, I despise it.

Unfortunately, the winners of 'breaking the MSM's monopoly on Truth' aren't
any better then what they replaced (And are in many ways, much worse.) Their
output is, by far and large, the worst kind of yellow journalism.

Unsurprisingly, nobody actually wants the truth. The people shouting from the
rooftops about corruption and bias, and collusion in the NYT turn around and
uncritically read about how Hillary is in cahoots with gay alien pedophiles
operating out of the back room of a pizza joint. Or, alternatively, how _this_
is totally the week that Trump's finished. (And did you see the great burn
some celebrity gave him?)

~~~
malvosenior
I think that’s a bit of a straw-man. You can be critical of the NYT _and_
Brietbart (I know I am!).

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shawnee_
_But the very existence of their project raises an important question: If two
volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure
out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the
same?_

Twitter has every incentive to lie, to minimize, to shove this under the rug.
As a fairly recent IPO with virtually flat/negative user growth, and lots of
fed up people (like me) abandoning the platform all together, it is desperate
to squelch any negative info that Wall Street might use against it.

Unfortunately, there's no favorable outcome for Twitter shareholders in either
case. Twitter fesses up about its actual percent of bots (reality is likely
closer to 50 percent than the 5 percent it claims) and its numbers go down
even more. Twitter continues to lie and folks like the ones in this article
expose them ... not good either because every advertising dollar it's getting
is "truthfully" reaching fewer actual humans.

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bob_theslob646
This is a repost. What these kids are doing, is what Twitter is doing.

Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this.

This article comes off as if Twitter does not know what they are doing, which
I think is hard to believe.

What I think these kids are going to find out, it's not that easy as it
sounds.

Couldn't anyone do what these people are doing with a couple hundred bucks
using Google cloud services and their natural langage API to label positive
and negative tweets.

Seeing news like this which is not news, makes me realize how gullable people
are about what goes into 'models'.

People have no idea how hard nlp is. That is all lol.

~~~
jackmott
>Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this.

Don't know, but they aren't.

~~~
Bartweiss
I'm not at all convinced; the students in the article are getting by because
they have no particular fear of false positives. They're just some guys saying
"yeah, looks like a bot!"

Twitter has a much harder post-discovery choice. Do they disable or publicly
flag accounts, and catch flack for hitting real ones? Or do they monitor
internally and wait for high confidence, then get in trouble for not doing
enough?

I don't see how Twitter could offer a comparable service even with a
comparable tool; being the official overseer of the question leaves them with
too much responsibility.

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1024core
Reminds me of the early days of spam fighting. It looked so easy: just build a
Bayesian model and boom! Spam begone!

Sadly, there's a drawback to open systems (like this one), that the robot
controllers can keep probing for weaknesses and keep changing their style.

Of course, such extension also begs the question: how will they (the creators)
make money? "Volume", you say?

~~~
theashbhat
hey! One of said creators here! We haven't figured out how to monetize /
properly fund this yet. It's more so a problem we saw and attempted to solve.
The cost right now is a couple hundred dollars month in server costs.

~~~
1024core
Please don't take my comment(s) as criticism: you're doing a good job. Even if
you don't make any money doing this, it's a fun thing to do. In the worst case
Twitter will (acqui)hire you.

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samsolomon
It seems that the people who are most likely to tell human from bot are the
ones who would use Chrome extensions. I am glad people are working on
solutions, but I'd love to see an approach that works for all users.

For example there could be a Twitter account that replies to every bot tweet
and those included in the bot's tweets. Accounts that have a high likelihood
of being a bot would get a reply stating that the account is likely a bot.

I'm just spitballing—certainly, this would push up on Twitter's API
limitations. But it seems like there a much better way to identify fake
accounts than through a Chrome extension.

~~~
theashbhat
One of the creators here: Yup! Our current users are more engaged and active
on Twitter than the average users.

The chrome extension and website release also helps improve our model
significantly. We get feedback on how it works in the wild and false positives
that we can use to improve our model on.

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garybro
Tried my account. Says I'm a bot. My rating: incorrect.

~~~
eksu
I never used twitter before the 2016 election. I don't use twitter to
communicate with people I know in real life, but I know my father and I both
started using it as a place we can put on a pseudoname and talk about politics
openly, without having to worry about bothering friends & family like on
facebook.

Both my own and my father's accounts were classified as "exhibit patterns
conducive to a political bot or highly moderated account tweeting political
propaganda.", which is in a sense kinda accurate because they are solely
political outlets for us. I think this is a feature, not a bug, and probably
the only use case the service has provided for me.

I feel like twitter, tumblr, and other semi-anonymous networks have always
been pretty political. I think the only thing that has changed is that people
see twitter as news - stations actively report about what's going on on
twitter - and that online political discussions are no longer dominated by
liberal / social justice voices.

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dispossess
> If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can
> figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do
> the same?

Because the cost to the kids for a false positive is 0. The cost to Twitter
could be company destroying lawsuits.

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matt_wulfeck
Charge 2c per tweet and the issue will go away. The reason bots exists is
because there's zero friction to them.

~~~
mseebach
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong"

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gondo
so what are they doing in one sentence?

~~~
GCU-Empiricist
Writing an automated service that classifies if a twitter account is a
political bot. No word on their error rates.

~~~
finniananderson
It's impossible to determine the error rate - there is no way of knowing for
sure if an account is a bot or not. If there was, this model would be useless.
I'd be interested to know how they trained it though, given they didn't have
any true data to check against

~~~
giarc
They could check it against known bots though.

~~~
Bartweiss
That's only valid if the known bots are a random sample of all bots.

They can't test against a large array of public bots because they're only
detecting political bots, not everything automated. So they'd have to
train/test on "accounts which are definitely known to be bots, but trying to
hide it". Meaning, presumably, the least-convincing bots or bots specific to a
previously-exposed network.

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Floegipoky
Hot take: false positives don't matter. If somebody is using the service in a
way that makes them indistinguishable from a propaganda bot, the platform and
the discourse that it's supposed to further are better off without them.

~~~
hawleyal
Boom!

~~~
sctb
Please stop.

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neo4sure
Hey I used it on some MAGA supports and immediately found BOTS. Check out
botcheck.me. Some of them surprisingly didn't come up as BOTS.

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beamatronic
Monetizing a large user base?

~~~
fleitz
No kidding.

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throwaway2016a
This is a duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337)

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0xbear
Why only mention pro-Trump bots though? There were (and _still are_) tons of
pro-HRC bots as well, synchronously posting identical text and passing it off
as their own tweets. They aren’t even trying to hide it much.

~~~
theashbhat
Creator here! We do identify bot-like activity on both sides of the spectrum
(pro-hillary and pro-trump).

~~~
0xbear
The question wasn’t actually addressed to you, but to the author of the
article linked to the post.

They’re also pushing the “Russian interference” narrative, but as far as I can
tell your product can’t point out the source.

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jerkstate
Oh boy, this doesn't sound like a biased model at all

~~~
Eridrus
Yeah, these guys have absolutely no cost for being wrong.

~~~
smacktoward
What else would you expect would happen? In a town without law, it's only a
matter of time until the vigilantes show up. Either Twitter is going to police
its platform, or users are going to start policing it for them.

~~~
Eridrus
I expect this will have no real impact and these guys will have to find
something else to do with their time.

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dudul
"a Twitter user who is falsely identified as a bot has little recourse to
dispute the charges."

That's the spirit! What was this saying again? "Better to convict 10 innocent
men than to let at least 1 guilty go unpunished." That must be it...

~~~
arkitaip
Oh the horror of being cut off from twitter...

~~~
dudul
In a way, I agree with you. I despise Twitter and what people use it for.
However, if being cut off from Twitter is not a big deal, why is this bot hunt
worth doing?

If we assume that it's important to get rid off fake users, it must be because
accessing a platform like Twitter is important.

