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.

Comments

Why?

[magarity]

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?

Re:Why?

[tomhath]

Because sheeple see some celebrity has 50,000 followers, so they need to follow too.

Re:Why?

[sexconker]

1/3 spammer army, 1/3 in the hands of botnet operators to be sold off for use in trolling/harassment/activism campaigns, 1/3 Twitter inflating user numbers to get that sweet, sweet money.

Social media - 50% of the accounts are bots, but 100% of the users are fake.

Re:Why?

[Rick Schumann]

Imagine this: You have 350000 twitter-bots at your command. For the right price you can be hired to flood Twitter with whatever message you want.
It's a social engineering tool. People are gullible. Regardless of the 'strange usernames' or any enigmatic content they're tweeting otherwise, if the average Twitter user sees 350000 retweets of a particular message, they're going to believe it's a Real Thing, and they'll probably retweet it themselves, giving it even more momentum and credibility. Instant viral content.

Re:Why?

[FudRucker]

I follow two accounts, one is on the topic of Linux and the other is the topic of SDR Radios, and have nobody following me and i dont have a single tweat, i am a 100% lurker

Re:Why?

[operator_error]

This also helps to explain things: https://www.kcrw.com/news-cult...

Re:Why?

[rgmoore]

For the right price you can be hired to flood Twitter with whatever message you want.

Except that's of limited utility. A twitter feed only contains tweets by (or retweeted by) people the user is following, so tweeting by a bunch of bots with no followers won't flood the feeds of anyone else. You could use something like that to get a topic trending, but most people would ignore it once they realize it's just a bunch of bots tweeting the same message.

It's much more likely to be an army of followers for hire. There are apparently people who will pay real money to get an army of fake twitter followers to make them look more impressive. It apparently even works. People pay more attention to tweeters with more followers, so getting a bunch of fake followers can actually help you to get real ones.

Re:Why?

[Narcocide]

In all seriousness, I'd be surprised if the real number was below 80% for twitter. Most of the investors/shareholders - the ones who aren't actually involved in orchestrating the bots themselves that is - would be grabbing their torches and pitchforks if they knew.

To win elections

[rsilvergun]

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...

some are spammers

[FudRucker]

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

Re:Omg

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Hands off. That's my fiancee.

Took you long enough

[WillAffleckUW]

And I'll bet you thought Russia was doing this with real accounts?

350,000 accounts, only posts from Windows Phone

[SeaFox]

I can't imagine how they make that work with so few of the actual devices in use.

Re:350,000 accounts, only posts from Windows Phone

[Narcocide]

Chances are that they aren't even using one Windows Phone - just spoofing the browser ident string from a cluster of virtual servers running PHP scripts. But I guarantee that somewhere, someone is using these numbers to boost Windows Phone's reported popularity to existing/potential investors and app developers.

Re:The only question...

[AHuxley]

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.

There goes breitbart's numbers

[mnemotronic]

Down to the 71 actual humans who follow it.