
Quantifying the impact of the Twitter fake accounts purge – a technical analysis - ebursztein
https://elie.net/blog/web/quantifying-the-impact-of-the-twitter-fake-accounts-purge-a-technical-analysis
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spdustin
> For example, if an account had 1,000 followers pre-purge and 900 post-purge,
> its followers base loss would be: 900/1000=0.1, or 10 percent.

Did you mean "For example, if an account had 1,000 followers pre-purge and 900
post-purge, it lost 100 followers. Its followers base loss would therefore be:
100/1000=0.1, or 10 percent."

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emmanuelb
I wish one could get the dataset and see how many bots some specific people,
like politicians, might have had as followers.

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oh_sigh
I find it interesting that the bots preferred Obama, even on a percentage-of-
followers basis. What's the explanation? Were Obama's twitter numbers being
pumped at some point? Do bots just use Obama's account as a default-follow for
legitimacy?

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ortuna
might be the function of the default follow feature and when they were created

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TangoTrotFox
I have to say I rather enjoyed the snide, _" Determining how those accounts
were able to make such an impressive recovery is left as an exercise to the
reader."_ in relation to users that saw large number of bot followers
previously banned, followed by them rapidly gaining huge numbers of new
followers... somehow.

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AndrewStephens
I don't imagine the creators of the bot accounts were too upset by Twitter
eventually banning millions of their creations. Now they get to sell millions
of additional accounts to the same people all over again.

It doesn't take any fancy machine learning to figure out what is happening.

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jewelthief91
Brilliant. Twitter gets let off the hook by appearing to be "doing something"
and people who charge for followers get a revenue boost by this new form of
planned obsolescence. Twitter users get screwed by either getting caught up in
the purges or having to pay even more money to bot creators to inflate their
numbers, likely pricing many out of the market. Seems like a good time to
short Twitter stock...

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markblue
I didn't expect the number of followers loss to be over half a billion. Makes
me wonder how many accounts were purged. Even if each of the purged account
followed 100 of the account measured, it still means millions of accounts were
purged.

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jandrese
Twitter accounts were trivially easy to make. Bots could easily churn out tens
of thousands or more in just a few hours. The whole service is lousy with
bots.

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everdev
I tried to create multiple accounts (from the same IP mind you) about 3 months
ago and many of them required me to verify a phone before registering or got
flagged shortly after as potential spam, which was accurate.

I was curious how easy it was and for me it wasn't super simple especially the
phone verification step.

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jandrese
The phone verification step appeared when Twitter finally realized (way too
late) that they have a bot problem.

A few years ago (before the 2016 election) they didn't give a crap.

They've only started purging bot accounts in the past year or so. There was an
uproar from the Fox News crowd about how they were being unfairly targeted by
liberal Twitter because their subscriber counts were dropping like flies.

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jewelthief91
I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that many human users are being
caught up these "purges". I lost my twitter account because they determined I
was a "bot" somehow. I didn't want to give them my phone number to prove that
I was a human so I ended up having to make another account. Social media has
become incredibly toxic in the past few years with hate speech and the self-
proclaimed social justice heroes who think banning anyone for wrong-think is
necessary to "save Democracy". The whole thing is a mess.

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whatshisface
Fortunately for Twitter, the bots lacked the tenacity and capability for
repetition that the humans had and did _not_ create new accounts.

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0xb100db1ade
I assume you meant to add a /s to that

