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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?
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
Hands off. That's my fiancee.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"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.
And I'll bet you thought Russia was doing this with real accounts?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The internet. Where the women are men and the children are FBI agents.
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.
Always at war, so its always 1984. Lots of escapist fun so a hint of Huxley. As for nonexistent writings, non-existent authors and translations, that would be the online world :)
Fake accounts supporting average celebrities on social media is just something that adds to the fake fame.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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...
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.
"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.
". 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...
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.
...emotional American commenter.
hey, we're good at making highly charged comments like we're an authority of the subject matter even though we ain't got a clue what it is.
mfwright@batnet.com