
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts - ganlad
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/31/technology/social-media-bots-investigations.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/technology
======
ActsJuvenile
Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to
search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis.

I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots,
corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just
plain old spam bots.

How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20
real human users. That signal to noise ratio is dismal, and detrimental to the
core product experience. Twitter must be forced to maintain this fake high
activity to prop up the share price.

BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow
any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems
to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in
porn.

~~~
nkkollaw
I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on
Twitter.

I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use
it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use
it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most
stressful thing I've ever used.

I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests.
That's pretty much it.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the
> least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used.

Depends _heavily_ on the set of people you follow. I've found it to be a great
source of news, and I typically see news show up there hours to days before I
see it show up in places like HN.

~~~
7dare
For instance, if you follow sports, it's an extremely efficient and direct way
of keeping up-to-date with teams and players.

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tinbad
It's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of
ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake
accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about
it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each
account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just
the right thing to do.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/957686987229618176](https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/957686987229618176)

~~~
yourdonut
Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth
and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--
if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience.
This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of
porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.

~~~
spamizbad
Facebook certainly has been more diligent about stomping out fake accounts
than most other services, with Twitter being social media's problem child.

A telling anecdote: A security researcher friend of mine found a somewhat
small botnet of twitter accounts (~7000). Reported it to twitter, a few months
passed and he noticed twitter hadn't done anything. So he turned it over to a
journalist who eventually poked someone at twitter and... _poof_ all 7000+
accounts were gone 6 hours later.

~~~
dogweather
WTF? What can account for that? I'm not cynical enough to believe that they
_encourage_ botnets.

Maybe simply no dedicated people or team for the problem?

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jashmenn
We have to be careful about botshaming people who have too many fake
followers: it's pretty easy to buy your enemy a bunch of fake followers just
to discredit them.

Fun story, years ago in my office, before buying followers was well known,
folks would prank each other by buying fake followers for our co-workers.
They'd wake up and be so happy and surprised and then have to spend the
weekend manually blocking each one.

At the time it seemed pretty harmless, but now it is definitely a threat to
someone's credibility.

~~~
orionblastar
Also fake SEO stuff like make an illegal web farm copied from your
competitor's site and use a spambot to post their URL everywhere so Google
penalizes then in web rank.

I was on Uncyclopedia when someone did that to get them removed from Google.

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strgrd
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726214)

"Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will
be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks."

~~~
staplers
What a profoundly insightful comment thread that is. Thanks for linking.

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grizzles
I have a (maybe) interesting twitter related anecdote. 5-6 weeks back I went
to the twitter website and I was greeted with a login screen. I couldn't
remember my password and didn't feel like finding it so I went off to look at
other sites. That happened a few times, until I went back and POOF, I am
automatically logged back in again. I've never seen a site un-invalidate an
auth token before. Cool beans.

~~~
jeffwass
I had something similarly weird with amazon.

I got a new iPhone and on iOS Safari I needed to sign in to all my accounts.

Except for some reason Amazon recognised me with one-click enabled. I never
used one-click to buy anything before and accidentally bought a kindle book
while browsing the site.

More strangely, when I went to turn off one-click in my settings I was forced
to log in.

So I could one-click buy without explicitly authenticating, but needed to
authenticate to disable it. Very strange and/or shady.

Btw - is there an easy way to cancel an accidental one-click buy? In my case
it was a local author I wanted to support anyway, so I’ll keep the purchase.
But surprised it’s so easy to accidentally purchase something from the mobile
site if you swipe to scroll on the wrong place.

~~~
CodeWriter23
FYI Kindle purchases can only be made via one-click. I hated when Amazon
forced me to enable it to get a copy of Traction.

------
S_A_P
In a somewhat related note. I read the original NY Times article that laid out
the case for the fake followers. The combination of good writing,
investigative journalism and compelling presentation actually made me feel
like they are producing content worth paying for. I am now subscribing to the
new york times.

~~~
mike_hearn
Don't take anything you read in the New York Times about twitter bots too
seriously. They do publish articles that look superficially well researched
but which are nonsense or actually deceptive:

[https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-
ad66f...](https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a)

The problem is that some phrases that appear on the surface to have one
meaning have been grabbed and redefined by particular political groups, almost
used as code words. "Bot" and especially "Russian Twitter Bot" for example
isn't used by Twitter or others in the way you'd always expect:

[https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-
video-t...](https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/11/undercover-video-
twitter-engineers-to-ban-a-way-of-talking-through-shadow-banning-algorithms-
to-censor-opposing-political-opinions/)

 _" Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers," Singh
says. "They'll be like guns, God, America, like, and with the American flag
and like the cross. Who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."_

The idea that Twitter bots can change society in fundamental ways is one that
seems to obsess journalists, who all seem to spend half their day on Twitter
anyway, but I've yet to see evidence that it's true.

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Pxtl
Okay, who puts time on the Y axis of a graph? Honestly.

~~~
shagie
We scroll down and that becomes a "animation while scrolling". While its an
unusual orientation, it believe it is the right one. Its not a time axis - its
"time since the user was created".

The graph isn't a "this is how many followers the user had at this point in
time" but rather "right now, here are all the followers this user."

A point is "the Xth user following had a join date of Y" and thus the X axis
is in effect a time axis (though not a linear time axis).

From an eye scanning view, the horizontal bands are easier to follow and
notice than vertical ones - and that is part of the goal of the graphic (to
emphasize those bands).

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patorjk
I'm having trouble understanding the follower visualizations. Does the X axis
represent her followers in the order they started following her and the Y axis
is the date they (the follower) joined Twitter?

~~~
7dare
The original article suffered from the same flaw, and they never really
explained it.

------
mlb_hn
I don't get the justification for labeling the initial block as organic
growth, unless they're claiming that only the horizontal stratification is
signs of bot activity. The vertical stratification should also be signs of bot
activity, and as they point out, many of the supposed bots were in the
vertical stratification groups.

For those not familiar with the graphs, the graph shows date followed on x and
date created on y. Where there's horizontal stratification, NYT noticed it
means the follower accounts that all began following the account at the same
time were also created around the same time, indicating a strain of bots.
However, when there's vertical stratification, there's a shift in the rate at
which accounts are following the account. When the vertical stratification is
followed by horizontal stratification, it's an indication that both sets are
bots - for example, one scenario is that instead of providing a mix of bots
created at different time, someone got lazy and just grabbed a list of bots
all created at the same time. However, vertical stratification could also just
indicate that the person did something good or bad to change the rate of
acquiring new followers so it isn't clear cut. That being said, I'm not sure
that justifies labeling the initial section which lacks horizontal
stratification as organic.

------
fabatka
What I don't really understand about this is, why is anybody concerned with
fake accounts and followers outside of ad companies? (Disregard now the
possible public opinion influencing use of huge fake account networks, I can't
even see this argument against bot accounts in this article.) As I see it,
both bot account sellers/maintainers and celebrities profit from this, only
the ad companies can lose when their business partners realize that they get
fake visibility for their money and decide not to give money for this. Of
course this would in turn eliminate the sponsorships of accounts and thus the
buying of fake followers. So I guess I don't really get why this industry
exists in the first place...

------
oblio
We’re probably 10-20 years away from the internet and especially instant
messaging becoming a public utility. The product itself is immensely useful
but so far hasn’t been monetized except by lock in to a bigger platform or by
turning the user into a product.

We’ve had AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and many others that can be seen in
the list of protocols supported by pidgin.im. Now we have Facebook Messenger,
Whatsapp, Skype, Hangouts and the thing from Apple.

Or at least there should be a standard everyone that wants to sell to public
institutions should follow for instant messaging.

------
anfilt
I am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake
accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY
times would care about?

~~~
ddebernardy
To name but a few reasons off the bat:

1\. Twitter is selling content feeds to TV news networks. With enough bots out
there your tweet may very well end up on TV.

2\. It counts for SEO. I once met a guy in 2010-ish who was into casino SEO.
He was running a network of ~150k FB/Twitter accounts to promote articles that
quoted the oddball news outfits that quoted his clients' press releases.

3\. Some people actually read what's going on on Twitter. In particular
journalists and swaths of opinion leaders. See any late night show, really,
for ample Twitter coverage.

4\. Some people with tons of followers occasionally retweet garbage memes on
Twitter, including racist videos tweeted by white supremacist UK groups that
turn out to be fake.

------
code4tee
What’s even worse is that advertisers end up paying a lot of money to
advertise to these bots. In an early ad campaign with Twitter we quickly
realized a lot of our spend on “engagements” was engagements with bots. We
pulled the plug on Twitter spend really quick.

This has been a known problem for a while and Twitter has done little to fix
it at scale. Given that they make their money on these paid “engagements”
there are going to be a lot of people taking a real close look at this.
Interesting days for Twitter ahead.

------
grangerize
I don't know if it is only me but I like when the graph changes as you scroll
down to give you more insights.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I tend to soft-block (block and then immediately unblock, it removes them as a
follower) most new followers, because most are either brands or fake accounts.

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ahamedirshad123
One Indian actor threatened to quit twitter, because another actor has more
followers than him.

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forkandwait
I have completely ignored Twitter since some guy told me about it 10 years
ago, and I have not once thought "wow, I wish I had paid more attention to
that."

~~~
jashmenn
Just wait until you learn about Bitcoin

