
Up to 48M Twitter accounts may be bots - gopalakrishnans
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/as-many-as-48-million-twitter-accounts-arent-people-says-study/ar-AAo9e16?li=AA4Zoy&ocid=spartandhp
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Zenst
Came across one the other day, just by mentioning in a post "blue plaque", got
instant like and retweet.

This started me thinking of a little game - what post with the limitations of
140 characters could you post that would trigger the attention of the most
bots for automatic retweets/likes?

It's on my to do list, when bored, but I'd imagine others have had comparable
thoughts and may of already had a go.

Anybody got any other examples?

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bigdubs
#maga

the trump astroturfing army is aggressive

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hanniabu
Is that an acronym?

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smcl
"Make America Great Again" \- Trump's election slogan

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have_faith
Better title: "Up to 48 Twitter accounts may be human"

Snark aside, there is no way around this. Followers in digital public spaces
are representative of social status, the demand for appearing popular will
never go away and so neither will the bots.

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m1sta_
Confirmed identity with the service would resolve this.

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ticviking
And result in a rich trove of rich identities to be stolen.

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brian-armstrong
This isn't necessarily true. If world governments could use their records to
create an OAuth-like service, you could uniquely verify citizenship without
giving away personally identifying information

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TheRealDunkirk
Shall I go ahead and start the over/under pool on how long it would take
before it was hacked? I think it's a compelling idea, but it would probably be
the most-interesting target in the world.

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doctorless
I think a singular, required identity service on the Internet is one of the
greatest threats to free speech.

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chillwaves
how about a voluntary one? Let people be authenticated and let people see how
many followers are authenticated or not.

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makecheck
While automatic control of computerized interfaces should surprise no one,
“bot”-like behavior is not limited to computers and isn’t new. One should
always be skeptical even when something comes from humans: for instance, a
“customer review” could be a paid reviewer, or someone talking on the nightly
news could be essentially controlled by the puppet strings of their
organization and not really voicing their own position. Ideally no one ever
puts too much faith in what they hear from a handful of people because that is
not statistically significant (there are literally hundreds of millions of
people in the U.S. alone, billions in the world; sample sizes must be
gigantic).

Where “millions” of accounts become dangerous is when trying to determine if
even a “statistically significant sample size” is legitimate. I seriously
doubt that most organizations ever come close to finding a large enough sample
in the first place before reporting a finding. And yet, if they _primarily_
look at online postings instead of actually talking to people, it’s likely
that even a large sample is totally messed up. That should concern everyone.

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jsemrau
And one of them is mine. It recommends an event once you tweet to her. It is
actually a service that many people appreciate. So in summary, bot != bad.

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astrodust
#notallbots?

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wnevets
#botlivesmatter

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jasode
To compare, I looked up the estimates[1][2] on Facebook and if we use 170
million out of 1.4 billion, that's ~11.7%. That is in the ballpark of
Twitter's 15% (48m/319m).

I guess if you make a popular service that doesn't require a credit-card
payment or phone SMS text as a test for human verification, you should expect
>10% of fake accounts even with state-of-the-art heuristics detection.

[1] not sure why Huffington Post is top google link about it but the other
news sites say the same 170M: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-
parsons/facebooks-war-co...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-
parsons/facebooks-war-continues-against-fake-profiles-and-bots_b_6914282.html)

[2] 2015 1Q user count: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-
monthly...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-
active-facebook-users-worldwide/)

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blackice
You can look for proxy / hosting IPs. These bots are most likely running on
servers.

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ben_jones
So wouldn't it be relatively simple to block AWS/Azure/etc ip blocks AND
duplicate accounts from single addresses? Wouldn't that be a large drop in
bots right there?

Corollary: I once played a large MMO that intentionally inflated user numbers
right before they were acquired via content updates that encouraged the
creation of multiple bots per actual player. I'm sure at some level executives
are aware that bots are good for business and allow them to persist.

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Dim25
Heh, personally, it feels like 80% of twitter are various "Social Media
Automation Tools" following and retweeting each other.

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RussianCow
This reminds me of the Onion Talks episode, "Using Social Media To Cover For
Lack Of Original Thought"[0].

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY)

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patgenzler
This is a result of what I call "audience economy". People want an audience
and are willing to pay for it. Audience likes to see a prior audience. Bots
enable prior audiences. Platforms like fiverr enable bots.

 _Get 5000 twitter followers for $5_

Those 5000 fake followers make you look good to people that come across you,
and they flow.

So it's all about an initial audience.

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pierrepoutine
It feels very discouraging to start out in this space once a given platform
reaches a certain level of maturity. For instance, Insta now seems littered
with these local service/small-business accounts spamming the most optimised
hashtags with inspirational quotes on stock photographs; most engagement seems
to come from bots and scripts being used by these same accounts. (Maybe I'm
playing the game wrong.)

Does buying 5k followers really help in any way? Won't the more sophisticated
users (ideally those whom you'd be targeting as followers) see through this
based on your engagement rates, or does having a certain number of followers
hold some weight with the algos which leads to your stuff attracting more
engagement, followers, etc. in some kind of virtuous cycle?

~~~
patgenzler
Unfortunately no. When a social platform becomes "big" as in, reaches early
majority, spam finds a way in. No algorithm can stop it. Quantity kills
quality. The "sophisticated" early adopters lose it.

Look around. People will do whatever it takes to get to "front page", "top
stories", and such.

Medium obsesses about quality, but their top stories, fueled by
recommendations from "the common man", are full of junk. Same with LinkedIn.
Twitter. Facebook.

HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

~~~
owenmarshall
> HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

lol

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Kexoth
I'm thinking that this is not as `black&white` as said.

There are accounts which actually are used by people/companies, they post
authentic content but do some automated actions.

E.g. a company account which tweets authentic content for their field but on
the other hand has automated retweets on certain hashtags in order to gain
their authors as followers or to come up as related to other accounts in same
field.

Also to mention that there are services such as IFTTT which actually can help
you to automate such actions and make bot-like behavior.

I guess the same would apply to Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.

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Oatary
Does it really surprise anyone?

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tyingq
I figured it would be higher, since there's not much there to hold it to some
upper bound.

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Oatary
Guess you're right

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WillyOnWheels
The USC researchers own research says there's a 57 percent chance
@realdonaldtrump is a bot

[http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump](http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump)

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chrismealy
Have you read it? It sounds the like output of a Markov chain text generator.
Sad!

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doctorless
There's a method to that madness. Whether he is actually aware of it or not (I
lean more towards the former), that stream-of-consciousness styled rhetoric is
incredibly magnetizing to a large percentage of people. In my research on AI-
driven political engagement, I found that while intensively complex generated
argumentation can engage relatively sharper audiences without arousing
suspicion, it is more computationally expensive, and those people do not have
as much flex in opinion. The use of simpler, "like output of a Markov chain
text generator" styled tools help separate the wheat from the chaff in terms
of pliability.

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paulgrimes1
Of the 48M, somehow 31.6M of them are inexplicably One Direction fans

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hacker_9
This won't suprised anyone that uses twitter. In fact I rely on 2-3 bots to
retweet my tweets and so get more coverage. They have a place, it's not all
bad.

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mcculley
The article said that.

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nthcolumn
There is a recent trend in anti-Twitter chatter. I seem to remember msn-bots
being all the rage once upon a time.

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gozur88
I'd ask for my money back if I'd been marketing on Twitter.

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edibleEnergy
There's really no legitimate reason why twitter allows follows via their
API[1]. I'm not sure if they see some benefit from allowing spam-follow bots
to run wild or what they could possibly be thinking.

[1]:
[https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/crea...](https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/create)

~~~
nperez
There's also no reason to believe that botting is done via API in most cases.
I would think it's easier to detect + ban that way. I don't know how it's done
in the majority of cases, but I know it's not particularly difficult to write
a bot that drives an actual browser and emulates human mouse behavior.

