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Hackers Are So Fed Up With Twitter Bots They're Hunting Them Down Themselves (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Even if Twitter hasn't invested much in anti-bot software, some of its most technically proficient users have. They're writing and refining code that can use Twitter's public application programming interface, or API, as well as Google and other online interfaces, to ferret out fake accounts and bad actors. The effort, at least among the researchers I spoke with, has begun with hunting bots designed to promote pornographic material -- a type of fake account that is particularly easy to spot -- but the plan is to eventually broaden the hunt to other types of bots. The bot-hunting programming and research has been a strictly volunteer, part-time endeavor, but the efforts have collectively identified tens of thousands of fake accounts, underlining just how much low-hanging fruit remains for Twitter to prune.
Among the part-time bot-hunters is French security researcher and freelance Android developer Baptiste Robert, who in February of this year noticed that Twitter accounts with profile photos of scantily clad women were liking his tweets or following him on Twitter. Aside from the sexually suggestive images, the bots had similarities. Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts, liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios.
Among the part-time bot-hunters is French security researcher and freelance Android developer Baptiste Robert, who in February of this year noticed that Twitter accounts with profile photos of scantily clad women were liking his tweets or following him on Twitter. Aside from the sexually suggestive images, the bots had similarities. Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts, liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios.
Yo whipslash... I think this one actually might have read the article... That wouldn't bode well for that anti-troll filter that was mentioned a while ago.
Still, it seems to be somewhat more intelligent than the average troll.
Interesting specimen for sure.
Social platforms that promote popularity (and even pay for it) will always have actors that will try and profit from it in any way possible. Heck I even coded a Twitter bot to try and build up followers once as an experiment, I actually posted a quote of the day, image of the day, joke of the day, so it wasn't that evil of a bot.
Social media is a social deconstruct, hopefully it dies sooner than later and spares humanity more grief. You reap what you sow right?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Am I the only one who see this as the equivalent of going over to the nearest gas station and volunteering to clean their bathrooms?
Log in or piss off.
I started finding bots on twitter since a few years, first as a hobby, but then i write some code and start to find patterns. I even ended in the local news because my findings. The bots are evolving because the bot creators need to keep them alive and working more and more, there is a huge business and it gives a lot of money. My actual software has a catalog of more than 50k users with political affiliations (from Argentina), some 10k fake accounts, and fake accounts are more important than bots. The problem is: a bot is detectable because it follows predictable patterns, but a fake account used by a human is... very human like. So you can't detect it, is not so obvious, if you say something to them they answer you, and is a real human there. Fake accounts are the real problem, so my research moved from bots to fakes, still capturing bots (easy part), but identifying fakes is the most hard job here. And i'm only working with Argentina accounts because we have a very active political twitter bubble, and because Twitter has limits in it's API, i think if i move to a bigger country the thing will be amazingly huge. My actual database has 10GB worth of tweets, many of them a nice feed for Machine Learning, my next development :P
sorry for my limited english ;)
The signal-to-noise ratio in a lot of subjects gets so low that, even if you can immediately and perfectly identify a bot as such, you'll still be unable to have useful communication because you'll have to scroll through dozens of bots to get to an actual person - who is probably just arguing with bots.
For instance, click on *any* trending hashtag. Top one right now, for me, is "#MondayMotivation", a recurring hashtag for people looking for some vague platitudes to try to motivate themselves on a Monday morning. First two (again, for me, at the time I clicked the link) were relatively on-topic, by "verified" twits. One's @DisneyAnimation posting a gif from Mulan's training montage, the next is some platitudes from @VexKing, whoever that is. Both of these are hours old - two and six hours, respectively.
Next one is some idiot yammering about how the Mueller probe is fake news, only dems colluded, #maga. It's either a bot or a human who fails the turing test. I could see a tenuous connection to the topic, but there's no actual connection given. The hashtag was just thrown on there to get views and responses.
Then there's a RT/follow "competition", obviously a bot, no relevance whatsoever to the topic.
I'm not going to bother combing through the rest, because I've got better shit to do, but you can see how roughly half the "above the fold" tweets were noise. And it's pretty apparent that Twitter's doing some sorting to put "verified" twits at the top, to try to boost the signal.
The only way to win is not to play.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Your turn.