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Researchers Discover Massive Networks of Fake Twitter Accounts (bbc.com)
mi writes: Turns out, there are researchers studying ways to identify bots on Twitter -- fake accounts used by individuals or groups for various purposes. They identified, what seems like a collection of 350,000 accounts, all of which share the same subtle characteristics: tweets coming from places where nobody lives; messages being posted only from Windows phones; exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels. "Considering all the efforts already there in detecting bots, it is amazing that we can still find so many bots, much more than previous research," Dr Zhou, a senior lecturer from UCL, told the BBC. Juan Echeverria uncovered the massive networks by combing through a sample of 1% of Twitter users in order to get a better understanding of how people use the social network. He is now asking the public via a website and a Twitter account to report bots to get a better idea of how prevalent they are. Some bots are easy to spot as they likely have been created recently, have few followers, have strange usernames and little content in the messages.
have few followers, have strange usernames and little content in the messages
So why bother setting it up? How does one monetize a twitterbot swarm of strange names with banal content?
... is whether we're living in an age of dystopian fiction, juvenile fiction, or magical realism. Orwell, Huxley, Carroll, or J. L. Borges?
Whoever it is, reality needs new writers.
Twitter and Facebook played a yuge (pun) role in the last US Presidential elections. It'd be silly to ignore the effectiveness of large social networks in various kinds of propaganda. I'm sure that wasn't lost on anyone last year...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
they post clickbait in the top trending tweats, i like to read through the top trending tweats and after a while i have learned to recognize them and i will report them, they usually use a cropped photo that links to their clickbait websites instead of just opening to show the full photo
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Some bots are easy to spot as they likely have been created recently, have few followers, have strange usernames and little content in the messages.
Wait a minute, that describes my Twitter account!
Seriously? Next you'll be saying all the chicks with big fake tits and 1 month old profiles on facebook that just friended me arent real.
they likely have been created recently, have few followers, have strange usernames and little content in the messages.
That sounds like my account.
"Take the secret plane to the island. It's already loaded with the gold. MOVE!!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
posting some examples?
And I'll bet you thought Russia was doing this with real accounts?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a vanity thing, but I want to "command" a bunch of fake followers to drive fake news and generally screw with certain people. I'm not willing to pay much for the privilege but it would be fun for about 2 days and then I go back not giving a F about twitter. So, yeah, it's best to just rent.
I can't imagine how they make that work with so few of the actual devices in use.
It's actually pretty good and might contain the answer to your question, without the vitriol of a post election emotional American commenter.
So if they found 350,000 fake accounts, why doesn't Twitter remove or deactivate them? Why in the world would you want to keep them?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This was noted in the election.
https://storify.com/LegInsurrection/exposing-donald-trump-s-twitter-botnet
The list of bots
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AV12NO9q4dS4lJTRnV3JcD71uCBT_gCnUm8W8RnsIQw/edit#gid=29919938
A mass of accounts with zero followers, all tweeting the same things, 465 Twitter users collectively urged people to complain to the FCC about Cruz robocalls, in total 1.78 million tweets attacking Ted Cruz.
Trump has Ruskie programmers helping out. They are likely the same group helping now to try to secure him as a fake 'popular' president.
I'm surprised anyone still have a Twitter account.
Fuck, you are annoying. You rant about people using anonymous handles and you were born as "apk"? Your parents fucked you over.
Get a life. Stop spamming this site.
You mean Leila234, MaryXXX, and Cindy987 aren't real? I'm heart broken. /sarc.
Down to the 71 actual humans who follow it.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
No, seriously. I won't touch twitter with a ten foot pole.
Right on APK!!!
Good of you to note RM and BH for standing up. You do it too.
"messages being posted only from Windows phones"
Both of them?
Well, at least Twitter keeps sending me validation requests for one or more fake Twitter accounts that I never created and have no interest in validating. The header of the email indicates that most of them are coming from a slightly mangled form of my email address that is used by spammers. I don't know what the scam is, but it's been going on for many months, perhaps even a couple of years now, so they must be making money somehow.
Tried to report it to Twitter and the google a couple of times, especially in the early months. They obviously aren't interested and did nothing to stop it. At first I was mostly concerned about some kind of identity theft. I'm still considering that as a possibility for the suckers that do validate the fake accounts, but so far I haven't detected any direct impact on me.
The fake Amazon account in my name seemed more dangerous, but at least Amazon finally did nuke that one (after 18 months and escalation all the way to jeff@ (more than once)). The fake Amazon account was actually validated to one of my email addresses, apparently via a bug in their Android app. (Another possibility in the Amazon case is that it was a scam like Wells Fargo case, with employees creating fake accounts to boost their performance ratings.) Suffice it to say that Amazon was not very forthcoming with details about what was going on or how they finally stopped it.
Anyway, in my first scan of these comments I couldn't find any similar reports. I thought it was a wholesale thing, but the lack of other reports makes me worry about spear-phishing... (I wouldn't be the real target, but it is possible that I could be an intermediate target.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
messages being posted only from Windows phones; exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels.
Remember Obi Wan Kenobi? Remember the Wookies? Remember the Windows phones? Remember the communists outside of White House? Remember the freedom of speech? Remember the Death Star? Oh, yeah I remember.
What is a fake account?
An account usually consists of a user id in a database somewhere, a username and a password. How can that be fake, unless by fake they mean "doesn't actually exist"?
As far as I know, unlike Facebook and Google, Twitter doesn't have a real name policy. Heck, there are comic characters with Twitter accounts, e.g. https://twitter.com/martenreed
So, "fake account" can't be an intentional (aka. propaganda) misspelling of "not a real person", or "person not using his legal name", because there is clearly nothing wrong with either of those.
Is it like a fake Rolex? As in it looks like a twitter account, but if you look closer at it you realize that it's actually a Facebook account?
nt
I couldn't find/didn't see any figures about how many Twitter accounts there are meant to be,nor how many of them are "active",I.e viewed at least once a month,350.000 fakes seem very small or is this just a certain sub-set of fake accounts ?
Have tried using Twitter twice over the years,sorry,but I just don't get the point of the "service" it's a very narrow slice of people that seem to use it on a regular basis..
Can't it just be re- named,naff,or popularity club ?
I wouldn't believe anything I found on Twitter anymore than i would something from f..book,or most "social media" sites,,as sources of "news" they leave an awful lot to to be desired..
I would suspect that using my viewed once a month measure,at least 50% of Twitter is fake/dead accounts..
". Some bots are easy to spot as they likely have been created recently, have few followers, have strange usernames and little content in the messages."
I am a bot, and I did not even know, the horror...
I call them "plastic people"
"Non-folk",who cannot think at all therefore cannot think for themselves..
"Horrible hollows",nothing inside,so shallow their entire lives/character/spirit shows in a one molecule thick layer on the outside..
but it's just cross contaminants from one "non-folk" to another,nothing of worth or value..
Just another example of someone making something good and another person comes in and wrecks it.
tweets coming from places where nobody lives; messages being posted only from Windows phones; exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels.
So, Windows Developers...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Why do we care about swarms of twitter bots? Follow a person, not a crowds.
As for the people who do follow crowds, I'm sure they're happy to donate money to Kanye's failing clothing line or help the good, christian, nigerian doctor/prince/barrister/uncle who is just trying to get his money out of the country.
I'm just unimaginative in my tweeting.