Slashdot Mirror
Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter To Slash Millions of Followers (nytimes.com)
Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users' followers on Thursday, signaling a major new effort to restore trust on the popular but embattled platform. From a report: The reform takes aim at a pervasive form of social media fraud. Many users have inflated their followers on Twitter or other services with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers. Twitter's decision will have an immediate impact: Beginning on Thursday, many users, including those who have bought fake followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see their follower numbers fall. While Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of questionable accounts from users' followers.
I hope there's a ton of "influencers" in this purge. They're the most fakety-fake-fake of all "media personalities."
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
My self worth!
Trump is going to have a conniption for the amount of followers he's going to lose. Grabbing popcorn in anticipation of the shit show our 5 year old POTUS is going to put on.
Because otherwise this is just another empty gesture from Twitter.
I've only got 42 as it is. I'm pretty sure 10-15 of them are real people, but if the rest are bots ... frankly, I don't wanna know.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Our online marketing manager had her account deleted a few weeks ago, and her assistant's account was deleted sometime this year since January when she last used it. I just checked my account, and other people can't see my Tweets. Twitter is really shooting themselves in the foot with this.
Does this mean Kim Kardashian will no longer be the most popular woman in the world?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I hope there's a ton of "influencers" in this purge. They're the most fakety-fake-fake of all "media personalities."
Uh, there's a difference between a fake account and a fake personality.
A Kardashian is a fake personality.
A fake account is what a Kardashian buys to perpetuate their fake personality.
At the end of the day it won't matter. This bullshit move isn't going to restore trust any more than a little blue checkmark did.
And twitter's market share drops to single digits as their use base is wiped out over night.
They may turn twatter in to something I can use. I've seen it as a garbage site from the beginning and due to this I have never created an account.
DELETE FROM twitter_users where user_bot_type = 'created_by_twitter_employee'
bam, then all the fake accounts twitter has been making themselves, go away.
Explain what twitter is for then GTFO my lawn.
You can't even sign up to twitter without being called fake and getting bounced. The idea is to link your phone number to the pron you look at.
I suspect most of my 1K+ followers are bots. Very few are real people. I just use my ten-year-old Twitter account to pimp my YouTube videos to comic con crowds over the weekends. I had 25.3K impressions and an average engagement rate of ~3% (that's great by traditional advertising standards) in the last 28 days.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
because i NEVER post any tweets, i luck 100% of the time in order to follow @versiontracker (Freshcode.club) it is basically what Freshmeat.org used to be that listed freshly release FOSS software,
i follow them and a few others, and thats all i do, i log on, read the new posts and leave, no tweets coming from me
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
See subject.
But if they weren't effective, companies (legitimate or not) wouldn't seek to court them. Influencers are nothing new, we just used to call them movie stars or rock stars without really thinking about them in terms of influence. The only thing that's really different with this new set on Twitter is that they don't necessarily have an celebrity (or they're famous merely for being famous) or skills that might even mislead people into trusting them in areas outside of that skill set.
At least with Twitter your average no talent schlub has as much chance of being an influencer as one of the Hollywood crowd. The internet is just a force for democratization, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those things which are being democratized are useful or good.
Because immigration.
> Tell me something, liitle conservative snowflakes: Where are all the
> conservative youtube, twitter, facebook, snapchat, instagram, etc of
> this world ? How come no conservative has ever come up with ideas like this ?
Want Youtube without the lib-left censors? ==> https://www.bitchute.com/
Want Twitter without the lib-left censors? ==> https://gab.ai/
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
In order to restore something, it must first have exited, then been lost.
Nobody with any sense would have trusted Twitter in the first place, and those that do are gullible enough that they never lost it.
So what's to restore?
Constant whining, raging, ridiculous behavior, obnoxious attitude, and parrots the DNC party line.
Clearly a bot.
Can they actually eliminate fake accounts faster than they are being created?
The British are a disease and the only cure is gas chambers and ovens.
What about dental care, diction lessons, and... are taste bud transplants a thing?
They are not 'followers'. They are at best deluded users, and at worst actually nonexistent fake accounts.
All that will be lost is;
Twitter stock value
Twitter prestige
Users' padded, invalid stats
Users' prestige
Our last shreds of stubborn innocence
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
ALEX JONES BHAHAHAHAAH!
FAKE NEWS!
fAkE Noise!!
What sound stage made your bullshit post?
Removing the bullshit follower accounts wont make me use twitter. Soooo, wasting your time. Just embrace your shitty platform.
When they figure out how to weed out fake account, could they share their knowledge with NextDoor.com?
Even the most obvious fakes are approved, and seldom deleted. In fact, complaining about the fakes will get you suspended.
In my neighborhood, we have/had:
- Jack Mehoff
- Pat McGroin
- Flappy Flapstick
- Elenor Capstick (seems innocuous, until "she" posts back-to-back comments with Flappy Flapstick)
- A fake reporter and fake executive producer of news from a local TV station. I reported it to the TV station. It wasn't them. They were contacting people about doing "stories".
These along with more than a dozen others are/were all the same person, apparently somebody unhappy with their HOA. They post as their neighbors who are not signed-up with Nextdoor on some of the fake accounts. I got stuck in the middle of this by trying to be nice and helping somebody sort Internet provider options. I got suspicious when "Pat McGroin" (how did I miss that?!) said that he lived in a complex for the developmentally disabled. ("We are all developmentally disabled up in here" was my first clue this was not genuine...) He went from asking for help about Internet providers to fake claims of elder abuse.
So, I Googled, expecting to find a group home, etc.. Nope, a normal condo complex with units selling from $500K to $700K. And one ass-pain homeowner who harasses the HOA and neighbors any way he can.
NextDoor apparently doesn't even make the most basic of checks. This guy logs-out and then right back in under a different account. I can guarantee he isn't using burner phones or posting from multiple Internet cafes. They give users "invitations" that they can use to invite others, and they are probably automatically approved without any checks - because of the fallacy that the inviter is a legitimate account. As well, "neighborhood leads" have super cow powers, and can approve new users. So, it only takes one bad apple to either hand out their 25 invitations to fakes, or become neighborhood lead and then approve fake accounts.
In case you're not familiar - NextDoor is a hyper-local site that limits visibility to immediate and nearby neighborhoods. They require real names and verify identity and residence. In theory.
NextDoor wants users to fell "safe" on their site. It is anything but.
I was hoping they would remove the Trump account. Tired of his fake news.
Were I generating such fake accounts, they wouldn't only follow people who paid me. I'd give each account several interests - e.g. 'jazz', 'online gaming', 'San Francisco'. Then I'd have them follow several legitimate people for each interest, randomly chosen. Finally when I get a jazz customer wanting followers, this account is one of the ones that might randomly be chosen to follow the customer.
The point being that if this is how it is done, completely innocent people will see their follower numbers drop when the fake accounts are deleted. Don't hurl accusations at someone who takes a 5% hit in their follower numbers.
I'd be surprised if these fake accounts don't work like this, because if they only follow paying customers they would be very very obvious to simple analysis by Twitter.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
while deleting fake accounts may be a good idea, hope they wont end up delete accounts of users who aren't frequently active on twitter? http://www.naijadailyfeed.com/
I love to blog http://www.naijadailyfeed.com
will be studio approve and positive on social media.
No comments about actors and their ability to act. No negative comments about the movie plot, script.
SJW on social media are ready to report and remove such accounts.
No blasphemy.
No memes about US politics.
No jokes about Spanish politics.
No funny images of French politicians.
No comments on how EU policy has failed in your country.
Social media is going to read like one big approve banner ad for any product, service, government, faith, publisher, brand.
Social media says its time to relax and read up on gov policy while shopping for your fav brands.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ooh, fatass virgin APK is ranting again.sad.
Should be interesting to see if we will see a drop in followers for some of these celebrities.
I suppose it would be fraud. Claiming that you have X number of followers to people who pay to have you promote their stuff.
L'Idiot
If I know modern day mainstream journalists I'm pretty sure they're going to be the people who cry foul the loudest if this is actually effective at curbing bought followers.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
It's extremely common in tech to have companies offer deals in exchange for tagging them on twitter / facebook / whatever. Gaming companies in particular do this all the time. It's sponsored placements without any full disclosure and quite illegal.
Short version is there are companies / inviduals out there with _massive_ botnets of completely bullshit personalities. To understand how they get paid you have to understand social media as a whole. Using something based heavily on followers, Twitch for example, it's easy to convert that into something monetary. There are people with hudnreds of thousands of followers or even millions yet have very low actual viewer counts. Some of them will pull a thousand or two per _stream_. None of those "users" chat, or interact at all with the site. They simply follow and viewbot. Streamers are rewarded based on metrics ultimately tied to viewers.
Take the same botnet and turn it into something political, say up/downvoats on a site like Slashdot and you quickly see how it's possible to dominate an agenda. These aren't kids in their basements, they are well paid and in some cases state sponsored (insert "russian hackers", "chineese hackers", etc). Controlling especially online dissent is more powerful then any ddos attack.
You fucking cunts.
I saw an article recently about how the "influencers" have been demanding things like free stays at resorts in exchange for a post. Not being a user of these social media platforms I was amazed at the brazenness of even sending an email to a hotel in the Maldives or Scotland and even asking for such a thing.
The entitlement mentality is absolutely dumbfounding.
Fake followers of conservative accounts are a bigger problem than fake followers of liberal accounts.
False positives that take down conservative accounts are a smaller problem than false positives that take down liberal accounts.
every. single. time.
but everyone has "good intent" so it's alright, then.
Regulate these entitled bastards. They have more power than the government did when the founders insisted on the first amendment.
Lots of obviously fake profiles. Lots of accounts that only follow you to advertise pay-for-followers services. These tend to go away, I don't know if they just unfollow marks who don't respond, or if Instagram deletes them.
That's not even getting into the tons of meme garbage, obvious photoshops, and other crappery that gets posted as "photography" on there. Even some of the better filtered interest group "hub" accounts are getting compromised by that trash.