
Signs you're following a fake Twitter account - floatingatoll
https://nixintel.info/osint/signs-youre-following-a-fake-twitter-account/
======
mikedilger
The bot panic is IMHO overblown.

This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and
deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing.

But the concern seems out of proportion.

Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset
of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news
media, spam, and now twitter bots.

Twitter bots are a bit worse than the others because we can no longer tell
what opinions are actually popular and which ones are manipulated... via
Twitter. But the ability to make such judgements via Twitter has only been
with us since 2006. The basic problem is not a novel one.

The bot problem cuts both ways because people will overly compensate. I've
been accused of being a bot, signalling to everyone that it's perfectly OK to
ignore the content of my argument. I fear many other right-leaning people are
getting the same treatment. This treatment further divides society (actual
bots do too, which I am NOT defending; I'm just showing that the issue cuts
both ways). Other commenters in this thread have been flagged and their
comments are dead apparently because (if you believe surrounding comments)
they are seen as a bot.

The day that Twitter becomes a voting platform, or voting platforms allow
bots... that is the day that I will panic about bots.

All that being said, carry on. Let's squash the bot problem. Let's also fix
advertising. Let's also fix news media bias. And spam.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
You say that the problem is overblown but then go on to talk about the
dangerous effects the problem has on discourse. Not only are the bots spewing
out propaganda, but as you say they destroy the trust we have in each other
which further builds the mindset of "Anything I believe in is true and
anything else must be bots". In my mind this makes the bot problem very bad.

The problem is made even worse when you have non bot accounts that spam out
low effort bad faith posts like "If climate change is real then explain x". It
takes 2 seconds to post that but 10 minutes to properly reply. And when you
look in to the post history of these accounts you can see they have been given
the same answer repeatedly but ignore it because their objective is not to
have a discussion or to learn, their objective is to waste peoples time and
create doubt.

~~~
marknutter
Or maybe they've never gotten what they feel to be an acceptable or compelling
answer.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
There never will be an acceptable or compelling answer to these people though.
They refuse to accept new information or anything that is different to the
talking point they have latched on to. Its especially true for bad news, we
all _want_ climate change to be a hoax, its much more convenient to believe
this than to accept reality.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> His two front teeth (red box) are different shapes and sizes.

Which would be entirely normal for a guy from Manchester. My two front teeth
are different shapes and sizes too. We don't really do "cosmetic dentistry"
here in the UK, certainly not to the extent it's practised in the US.

~~~
vertis
And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on (though
perhaps not to the extent in this article).

~~~
Seenso
> And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on
> (though perhaps not to the extent in this article).

Yeah, I was surprised the article made such a big deal about that. My ears are
also a little asymmetrical, and Stephen Colbert's [1] are very obviously so.

[1] A famous American comedian with a nightly talk show.

------
petargyurov
The biggest sign mentioned in the article is the insane number of tweets since
the inception of the account - surely this must set off some alerts on
Twitter's backend?

I know that this is an extremely difficult problem to solve and that they
probably ban accounts in waves but with something as obvious as this you'd
think that the ban could/should come more swiftly...

~~~
jimkleiber
I think it could be a relatively easy problem to solve: give any user the
option to verify their identity.

In this way, as verified accounts increase, the unverified accounts become
more obvious and I imagine we will start to view them with more scrutiny.

It would allow anonymity to remain, just make it so those accounts are more
obviously anonymous or pseudonymous.

~~~
brokensegue
Verify how

~~~
casefields
You should try signing up on Nextdoor. This isn't a hard problem, nor would
anyone be forced to verify themselves if they don't want to.

~~~
jimkleiber
I don't know if Nextdoor's method of mailing a card to someone's mailbox would
work for Twitter, but I like your example of a social network that has taken
verification much more seriously.

------
Zigurd
There is a general problem with platforms and fake entities of various kinds
posing as friendly, relatable individuals. This problem surfaces far less
deeply than you have to dig to find a well-crafted fake portrait.

Is that really a crafty artistic person turning out handmade items on Etsy, or
is it a front for a factory in China with dozens of pseudonymous identities on
Etsy? They take on multiple fake identities in order to appear to be humans
handcrafting their items in small batches. If one identity gets their cover
blown, it is shut down and replaced.

Is your AirBnB host with a woman's first name really renting out some family-
owned cottages, or is "she" a BPO messaging contact center who won't talk to
you on the phone? AirBnB's UI makes you sift through tens of pages of reviews
to glean hints. And that usually happens after you have suspicions due to a
foulup with a rental.

I haven't yet tried one of those "sharing economy" car rentals. But I suspect
they, too, have attracted aggregators posing behind multiple fake identities
to escape bad reputations if need be.

Social media and all kinds of other platforms need to look for and mitigate
damage to their brands from fake identities. These fakes are made, in part, to
game the platforms, and, in doing so, reduce their value.

~~~
strbean
> Is that really a crafty artistic person turning out handmade items on Etsy,
> or is it a front for a factory in China with dozens of pseudonymous
> identities on Etsy?

Ran into this when my fiancé was browsing Etsy to get an idea of how to price
some of her stained glass work. There was a particular listing that was
ridiculously cheap, which raised my eyebrows. I looked at their sales history,
and they had sold tens of thousands of this item. Clearly factory production
in China.

~~~
code_duck
It's been a problem for Etsy for 10 years. Rather than keep trying to stamp it
out, they instead tried to find a way to roll those people into their
platform.

------
DrNuke
Got out of Twitter after seven years using it like a breaking news website
from few vetted sources: bots, venom, ads and shameless plugs just made the
experience more and more unsufferable, so good riddance. Also unfollowed any
contact on LinkedIn, the amount of motivational fluff and plain gibberish just
astounding, something like facebook for professionals. Am I happier? Nope, but
the void will be somehow filled by something more productive or just
interesting.

~~~
vertis
I am incredibly close to getting rid of my twitter account. Already most of my
meaningful interactions have moved to private group chats on Slack (etc).

~~~
jvagner
I unfollowed all accounts, deleted all my tweets and just login periodically
to see what's trending or to follow a hashtag associated with a sporting event
I'm interested in. And since I do that from home, I have the twitter app on my
iPad but not my phone.

Nice way to keep it but throttle it.

------
non-entity
Easiest way I've found to spot bots on Twitter is username patterns where both
the handle and display name are similar or the same with 1 or 2 words (often a
first and last name) and a random number. For example _JohnDoe127474_. For a
more realistic example: I just went to the first trending semi-poltical topic
and this was the first bottish account I found (the tweet itself is pretty
benign):

[https://twitter.com/Elsie43733196/status/1235724530716377088...](https://twitter.com/Elsie43733196/status/1235724530716377088?s=19)

~~~
vangelis
Congrats, you've found someone who accepted the autogenerated username!

~~~
brewdad
Is someone who accepts to automated username likely to be contributing
anything of value? Human or bot, block and move on seems the best strategy.

------
anonnyj
I use This Person Does Not Exist for my shitposting avatar, but I'm certainly
not botting. I just can't have my spicy tweets related to my main account
because people will cancel me.

------
2zcon
>His two front teeth (red box) are different shapes and sizes. The teeth on
the right side of his mouth have not been rendered properly at all. An
analysis of Max’s facial features suggests he has more in common with an AI-
generated fake than with a real person.

Or a real person who didn't have braces?

~~~
TallGuyShort
It's actually a very interesting contrast with what "fake" used to mean in
digital media. You see models with flawless skin, perfect teeth, digitally
sculpted curves, and the original photo didn't look that flawless.

Now somebody has asymmetric ears like I do, and that's a hint they're fake?

------
volak
I think its interesting that Twitter has the capability to automatically and
instantly tag tweets or accounts as being written by third party apps

Yet they choose not to

~~~
osrec
Yes, I am perplexed by this. I have noted an insane number of bots commenting
positively on Donald Trump's twitter account. It's obvious they're bots
because of the username, lack of other activity, spelling and grammatical
mistakes (due to phrases being directly translated from Russian).

P.S. Whenever I mention the above on here, I am subject to a barrage of down
votes. Almost as if bots are searching HN comments and trying to down vote
anything that is negative towards Trump. If this gets down voted heavily,
it'll confirm my suspicions yet again...

~~~
dhosek
I've seen that in some comments I made on another story. Not sure whether it's
Russians or Russian bots or just HN-reading Trump fans.

~~~
dhosek
Downvoted already. On further reflection, I think it must be the last category
since it would be a challenge for a Russian [bot] account to get the karma to
be able to downvote.

~~~
osrec
You'd be surprised. I can imagine they've got a bit of link submission karma,
which allows them to downvote.

For what it's worth, I'm upvoting you!

------
knolax
The part where the article tries to "prove" that the photo was not of a real
person feels like phrenology more than anything. Real people can have
asynmetric ears and teeth, and most photographers deliberately try to frame
photos in a specific way so some random headshot having the same composition
of generated photos isn't much proof. Honestly it looks like this type of
psychotic paranoia over "bots" does more harm than actual bots themselves.

------
knzhou
This is worrying. I already get called a bot or a shill on the regular, and
now you can be called a bot for having crooked teeth or "asymmetric ears"? Now
I can look forward to internet sleuths scanning my profile picture for
imperfections.

~~~
vekker
Now it just takes a 2nd picture of yourself to prove them wrong, so I wouldn't
worry about that (yet?).

------
harrier
Systems like TPDNE can generate random fake people but can they generate
multiple different images of the same fake person? If that is not the case
then the existence of different photos should prove a person is real.

~~~
thefreeman
This was directly addressed in the article and no they cannot.

~~~
harrier
> TPDNE only creates a single image of a person

That doesn't state that it can't, only that it doesn't. Also, I am wondering
about other GANs/image generation systems and not just TPDNE specifically.

------
jimkleiber
Seems like the only reason Twitter created verified users was because they got
sued by Tony LaRussa for his account being impersonated.

What I'm wondering is when there will be a class-action lawsuit on behalf of
all the everyday people who have had their accounts impersonated?

I hope it doesn't have to happen that way, I hope Twitter gives everyone the
option to verify their profile, and yet I haven't seen much progress on this
front since 2016 when I started looking at it.

------
CapacitorSet
I feel like the article went way too much over aspects like TPDNE and the non-
existent lawyer, which - while being useful to know - are somewhat poor
indicators of fake profiles especially in a tech circle. I personally know a
few people who use TPDNE profile pictures and many who use fake names,
although none do both (a wise thing in this day and age). The rest was quite
lacking.

------
biznickman
I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is
not stopping this. They are contributing both to group psychosis and the
destruction of democracy through the spread of disinformation.

~~~
deminature
They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks
have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but
substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially.

Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot
Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to
expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the
latter rather than the former.

~~~
inetknght
> _but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn 't
> growing to expectations._

If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right
even if you disagree with the business dealings.

~~~
deminature
There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply
based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown
200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's
little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their
argument.

Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly
been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken
nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this
(hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback
from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-
facebo...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-
content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona)

------
jkubicek
The analysis of the generated profile images is all well and good, but a much
better indicator of a bot account[0] is the incessant tweeting about certain
issues with little to no commentary or context.

0: a bot account or a friend not worth continuing to follow

------
Waterluvian
Today I had someone reply to a comment of mine saying that I'm a bot and to
report me.

Am I not in on a joke? Or am I doing something bot like? Or do people use this
to exploit mindless masses to abuse the reporting system?

------
dghughes
I scrubbed my personal info on Twitter due to aggressive people and the
potential of doxing me. No birthday, no bio, no profile picture. Twitter won't
even let me follow anyone until I confirm my birthday.

------
m3kw9
Another sign is if they accidentally repeat themselves. It shows it could be a
bot account

------
subjectsigma
Hopefully this is not too off-topic, but - I like that the article focuses on
a bot spamming far-left propaganda. I have tried to encourage my far-right
relatives to stop knee-jerk sharing political articles and memes and to
diversify their news sources, but for some reason they think that anyone who
is worried about fake news, bots, or manipulating elections must be a Satan-
worshipping communist. I assume this is because the media has tried their
absolute hardest to use these facts to slander Trump.

How can we get people to stop focusing so much on the politics and see this as
kind of data integrity or trust issue? Showing that "it's not your tribe's
fault" is more emotional than rational but people may actually respond to
that.

------
DiabloD3
I have a much easier rule set for fake Twitter account detection:

Are they saying something I want to hear? Yes? Fake.

That's the complete ruleset. I do not follow anyone on Twitter as a result.

------
Hesavard
Twitter does absolutely nothing to exterminate old fake accounts. Probably
because the last time they did so and saw how many real accounts there were,
Twitter's stocks plummetted down

~~~
ewfwfewefewfwef
I think it was in a video with to mscott where woman from twitter talked about
this, yes false positives are a big problem when detecting fakes. But Twitter
is working hard to keep bad bots / fake accounts away. There was no last time,
right now people are working on banning fakes. It a 24/7 game.

------
xaxsacsdaffbnk
Many people use fake avatars, names and locations. Those are not good
indicators for bots.

Presumably it is more obvious by the stuff being posted.

However, the whole question is mostly irrelevant. If you don't care what an
account tweets about, don't follow it.

The big issue with the whole bot manipulation narrative is that while it is
easy to create fake accounts, it is not easy to also get followers for those
accounts. Without followers (with voting rights, not some other bots you
bought on the dark net), the bot accounts are irrelevant.

------
datashow
Why would I follow someone with only 73 followers in the first place?

I wish twitter can let me choose to filter out any information from accounts
with less than 10000 followers, with exception of my own followings.

~~~
GrinningFool
Why would you limit yourself to hearing only people who have large followings?

~~~
datashow
Because there are already too much info on Twitter. No?

~~~
GrinningFool
There is, but popularity doesn't seem like a good filter to determine the
value of a given feed.

------
listsfrin
This article is full of shit. At least until when I stopped reading there were
discussing about physical features that don't matter one bit for Twitter
accounts.

------
Lendal
Most of this article is talking about fake photos, not fake Twitter accounts.
He goes on to say that if you use your Twitter account for politics, then you
are fake.

The only thing I agree with is 766 posts in a week is extreme and is an
indicator of bot-like activity.

~~~
pjc50
_Only_ tweeting politics is a flag too; real humans have more than one
interest.

Another indicator that's non-obvious is posting time distribution. Humans
can't post 24h a day. But on the other hand if they're all in a 8h window,
that person is posting from work - are these posts their job?

~~~
skykooler
It's a flag, but not necessarily a sure indicator. For example, I have a
separate twitter account I only use for political discussions, so that the
replies I get don't overwhelm the other things I'm interested in.

------
brenden2
Twitter has become so low quality that I don't even bother looking at it
anymore. The interactions tend to be extremely negative, the ads are annoying
and irrelevant, and most of the people who get famous tend to be celebs or
narcissistic pseudo-intellectuals who just repeat whatever the populist
opinions are for their audience. I've found/met some interesting people though
Twitter before, but these days I find it's not worth the noise to find that
signal.

Twitter seems to want to resist any changes that would make the metrics look
bad, but those changes are necessary to make the platform good. For example,
they could offer a paid tier with more options to block/filter low quality
content. They should also make a decision to either allow all bots, or ban
them outright, and also make it easy for end users to tell whether an account
is a bot or not. They should scrap the blue check marks and just offer a
"twitter gold" badge for anyone willing to pay $5 a month. I don't really care
if Twitter has checked anyone's identity, I just want to know if the person
tweeting is a human or not.

~~~
zimpenfish
> more options to block/filter low quality content

Over and above what you can already do with curating your followers, blocking
people, muting people, muting hashtags, etc.? That's quite the range of
options for buffing up the quality content of your timeline, no?

