
Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers - nthitz
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/technology/twitter-fake-followers.html
======
traskjd
Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the
eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do.

I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook
continually announces record users, record MAUs and then _usually_ a week or
two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions
of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metrics.

Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from
people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's
part of my dislike of their platform, but they're more afraid of bad metrics
than genuinely delighting their customer base.

It becomes a negative feedback loop too. We used to spend significantly on
Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are
garbage/fake, we don't.

I know twitter gets a bunch of hate for not doing more, but realistically they
are actually leading the way. I'm impressed with how they're operating more
and more.

~~~
segmondy
As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake
users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to
show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created.
That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked
to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to
check their profile and see they have been tweeting tons! Meanwhile, I see
tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed
retweeted it. What I've done is to unfollow a good amount of folks to reduce
the noise.

~~~
jackfoxy
Exactly this.

My other beef with twitter is a more sophisticated way to filter my timeline.
I mean something that would make sense to a programmer, not the typical user
friendly useless thing.

~~~
sbr464
Yes I haven’t become a bigger Twitter user because it’s a huge time suck to
actually get to the few topics/groups I care about. Medium also needs to do
similar.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
Agreed. Basically, it is akin to having a second fulltime job. Except you
don’t get paid anything.

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lxmorj
Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account
with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to
continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto
BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the
source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.

~~~
spookyuser
The problem is so much worse than this now. There are dozens of fake accounts
under every one of his tweets and it doesn't even seem like these accounts are
trying anymore. Their names are sometimes random strings of letters, and they
just change their profile picture to a screenshotted version of Musks. Oh and
once you report one of these accounts it can take weeks for Twitter to do
anything

I also find it so strange that Twitter hasn't done anything to specifically
limit these accounts. They could even naively block normal users from having a
verified user's profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist.

~~~
Strom
> _They could even naively block normal users from having a verified user 's
> profile picture and this problem would virtually not exist._

I'm all for Twitter doing more, especially as they seemingly do nothing at all
to combat fake accounts. However I'm sure these spammers could just adjust a
few pixels on the profile image and a naive block wouldn't do anything.

~~~
spookyuser
Yeah I agree with that. Maybe they'll need a more sophisticated solution that
can check for visual similarity. But It just feels like they haven't even
acknowledged this as a problem, so I would be happy with any countermeasures
right now.

------
josefresco
Odd that they counted in the first place. Maybe this is part of a phased roll
out to identify first (refine the models), then take punitive action?

The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped
everyone's ego (and wallet)

"Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included
in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a
critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked
accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large
swath of users.

That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites
openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube,
Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi,
sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at
least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over."

~~~
jf
> The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped
> everyone's ego (and wallet)

I don't think you're being cynical. They counted in the first place because it
helped their _metrics_ – Twitter is in the business of selling advertising and
made the decisions they did in service of their advertising metrics.

~~~
throwaway427
I remember skimming their quarterly report a year or two ago and being shocked
that they focused so much on user acquisition as a core KPI given it was clear
how goosed those numbers were. I was expecting slightly more complex CLV type
numbers but instead they were fawning over a glorified "select count(*) from
users".

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aphextron
There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of
it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to
_all_ applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just
immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional
for those who don't care.

~~~
Brushfire
They started to do this but then paused all verifications because bots were
getting verified.

~~~
wild_preference
I saw one of those Ethereum scambot dopplegangers on a high profile tweet that
was verified. Really looked awful and definitely caused more damage since
people are trained to trust it.

~~~
saint_fiasco
Any hacker that manages to get the credentials of any verified user can just
change that account's name and picture to that of a famous person for easy
impersonation.

~~~
realusername
Just the fact that you can get a verified account and change the name to
anything without the need to get verified again is a massive loophole.

------
the-pigeon
I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like
it.

All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that
most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually
stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and
thus their valuations.

~~~
prolikewh0a
I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply
expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's
not exactly a wild thought.

[0]
[https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...](https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-
of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf)

~~~
andygates
Human logs on ,sees suspension notice, goes through unsuspension process.

Bot dies.

Those humans are usually very bot-like retweet mills anyway, in my experience.
Thou complain'st too much.

~~~
burfog
Nope.

Human logs in, sees Twitter demanding personal information like a phone number
or worse, goes away.

------
jermaustin1
As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step
this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks
come from fake accounts.

~~~
briandear
We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that
reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until
robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the
largest source of engagement.

~~~
JacobJans
I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it
strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you
can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500?

If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be
no reason to stop the ads.

~~~
jermaustin1
People are tracking ROI, and constantly testing new targeting parameters to
keep eking out a few more points of ROI. A lot of Facebook Ad spend is
experimental (especially at that low of a price). There used to be a time when
you could get real engagement for pennies each and build up a following of
real people based on a few ads then not have to spend anymore and go off your
organic growth and audience.

Now the second you stop the ad spend your engagement drops to nothing.

------
ceejayoz
It'll be fun seeing which accounts lose the most.

I expect a _lot_ of whining about it, particularly in the political realm.

~~~
ds0
Instagram is a space where influencers were deeply affected by a purging of
bot accounts (although I can't remember the year this occurred). People made
posts in droves complaining to Instagram, asking for them back, and in one
case a user cried that "those were users I will never get back".

------
christophclarke
Interesting to see social media platforms finally starting to be (somewhat)
more accountable to their users. Their motives are a dichotomy. On one hand,
their revenue comes from advertisers, so they must be attractive in the
"metrics," but by padding the metrics, they lose the users that those metrics
are supposed to reflect. It seems that Twitter has finally reached an
inflection point where having more engaged users is more important than just
having "good numbers."

As social media matures, I'm sure we'll see where the advertiser-friendly vs
user-friendly line is drawn. Reminiscent of the banner ad boom that initially
made great revenue for the sites, but in the end netted negative for the sites
because of the users it drove away.

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tropo
These are not bots.

I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot.
Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real
world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people
like their privacy.

The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward
the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively, and
twitter will assume you are a bot. The same does not seem to apply if you are
on the other side of the political spectrum.

I think Twitter is well aware of this, and they consider it an intended
result, but they can't just publicly admit it.

~~~
repolfx
That may not be Twitter's fault exactly. Twitter is overrun with left-leaning
SJW types and why is the W short for "warrior"? It's because again and again
these people use whatever tactics they can get their hands on to defeat their
perceived enemies i.e. anyone with conservative views.

Most likely there are people on Twitter who make it their mission to report
conservative tweeters as spammers, knowing full well that it will cause
Twitter to auto-harass them on their behalf. They do it in the hope they can
get these accounts shut down and thus "cleanse" Twitter of wrongthink.

This sort of behaviour should be easy to stop, but frankly Twitter's spam team
was never that good (just check account prices on the black market). Lots of
trivial techniques were never implemented by them.

------
27182818284
Good. If you follow any remotely popular people you'll run in to bots. You can
see bots spamming replies to people even with just 80,000 followers --less
than the million mark.

------
patrickg_zill
The reality is, that Twitter could have easily and simply fixed this issue
long, long ago.

But, to do so they would have to place some power in the hands of the users.
They don't want to do this because it means a loss of their control over what
you see.

We already know that FB experimented with pushing people's mood and views on
subjects around; Twitter is not immune to such temptation also.

Simply: assign 2 scores to every user, each out of say, 1000 (100 is not
enough given Twitter's large userbase).

1 score is a category score, such as "lgbt politics" or even finer-grained
than that, easily done by simply reading all of a user's tweets and using
Bayesian (or some other classifier) auto-classification. This is a measure of
how the user is perceived by others, inside that category.

The other score is a combination of per-region or per-country (because in
general, people care about the people in their own country or region more),
plus number of times a user gets a like or retweet in that same region, etc.

Then, simply let people filter based on those 2 scores. If I set score 1 at
(cutoff everyone below 900) I will get top tweeters in each subject; if I set
score 2 at (cutoff 200) I will let most tweets across the world reach me. etc.
etc.

------
duxup
I wonder if bot sellers will see an increase in sales? and Twitter announces a
lot of new users soon.....

------
matt4077
The comments here are overwhelmingly misunderstanding twitter‘s action: it
will not lower their MAU numbers, where these accounts had already been
excluded. Twitter is now just following up by also removing spam accounts from
individual accounts‘ follower count.

------
KasianFranks
This has been the elephant in the room for Social since the beginning.

------
stevebmark
if you've invested in twitter, join the class action fraud lawsuit where
twitter knew about the 95mil+ fake accounts (conservative estimate), cause
it's 101 obvious fake accounts that any idiot could spot, and still projected
growth numbers including these accounts, and used those to help raise money.
classic silicon valley fraud.

------
simplecomplex
How can an account be fake? An account impersonating someone else? That's very
different from an account that exists solely to boost follower counts. What's
the problem with people paying to boost their follower count?

~~~
ravenstine
There really isn't, but then again, I don't know why they'd pay at all; it's
hilariously easy to get a "following" on Twitter by simply following random
people. I never use Twitter, but I once tried just following random people to
see what would happen and I had about 200 "followers" within a few days, all
from maybe an hour or two total of randomly clicking. Now 200 is peanuts, but
imagine if I had kept it up for longer! Hahaha. It's so ridiculous how easily
people will just follow each other on Twitter. It means virtually nothing,
with or without fake accounts or people paying to boost their count.

------
paulpauper
the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and
other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake
followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible
to the naked eye.

~~~
Jach
This sounds like something a bot / Russian troll would say.

~~~
dang
Please don't break the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate
astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This is a particularly toxic
variant of that poison, and it's important not to use it here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
Jach
I guess I forgot to add "/s", which I didn't think was against the guidelines
(just low value).

------
matchbok
Crazy that Twitter still sells ads and soooooo many of the accounts are bots.
They have an obvious interest in inflating the total numbers.

It's a super, super simple problem. If they really cared, they'd eliminate
bots entirely. Not that hard.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _It 's a super, super simple problem._

No offense, but that's incredibly easy to say when you're not the one
responsible for doing it.

~~~
matchbok
Verifying humans is a solved problem.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Please fill us in.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I share your skepticism.

CAPTCHAs are at best a game of cat-and-mouse, and are always open to relay
attacks anyway.

You can still verify in-person, and even check documents, but no web company
would even consider doing that, even for something like an optional 'fully
verified account' tag.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Even something like checking a phone number just means that you're limiting
the number of legitimate "bots" or alternate accounts people can have.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Indeed, that's a good way to raise the bar.

For small websites, even a completely trivial email check is enough to keep
out most spammers.

