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Twitter Still Can't Keep Up With Its Flood of Junk Accounts, Study Finds (wired.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the there's-more-where-that-came-from dept.

According to a new 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, researchers write that Twitter still isn't keeping up with the flood of automated accounts designed to spread spam, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics. Wired reports: In a 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, Zubair Shafiq, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, and his graduate student Shehroze Farooqi identified more than 167,000 apps using Twitter's API to automate bot accounts that spread tens of millions of tweets pushing spam, links to malware, and astroturfing campaigns. They write that more than 60 percent of the time, Twitter waited for those apps to send more than 100 tweets before identifying them as abusive; the researchers' own detection method had flagged the vast majority of the malicious apps after just a handful of tweets. For about 40 percent of the apps the pair checked, Twitter seemed to take more than a month longer than the study's method to spot an app's abusive tweeting. That lag time, they estimate, allows abusive apps to cumulatively churn out tens of millions of tweets per month before they're banned.

The researchers say they've been sharing their results with Twitter for more than a year but that the company hasn't asked for further details of their method or data. When WIRED reached out to Twitter, the company expressed appreciation for the study's goals but objected to its findings, arguing that the Iowa researchers lacked the full picture of how it's fighting abusive accounts. "Research based solely on publicly available information about accounts and tweets on Twitter often cannot paint an accurate or complete picture of the steps we take to enforce our developer policies," a spokesperson wrote.

16 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Can't? by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Won't. Twitter knows. Twitter is carefully ignoring them for a precisely calibrated length of time designed to hide just how few actual unique humans use Twitter.

    "Research based solely on publicly available information about accounts and tweets on Twitter often cannot paint an accurate or complete picture of the steps we take to enforce our developer policies," a spokesperson wrote.

    Also, they're getting paid. Publicly available information does not include how much they're getting paid for allowing those accounts. So the spokesperson spoke the technical truth. The best kind of truth.

  2. Rounding error by rmdingler · · Score: 1

    There are a reported 500 million tweets per day.

    That lag time, they estimate, allows abusive apps to cumulatively churn out tens of millions of tweets per month before they're banned.

    So, basically, a rounding error?

    If we're going to have a forum to express opinion like twitter, and that necessity is up for further debate, at what point would you be comfortable with admin interference in the posting of opinions? One possibly troll post? Five?

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re: Rounding error by sound+vision · · Score: 1

      I haven't heard of any algorithm that can get it down to 5 spam posts, but if we can do 10 million instead of 20 million, I'm all for it. Why isn't Twitter all for it? Being a responsible corporate citizen would compel them to either work with these researchers, or hire others like them, to improve the value and indeed safety of their service.

      The only concern I can fathom is if the rate of false positives goes up, which is an unknown number, due to Twitter's stonewalling. (The darker the closet we are kept in, the better.) I will say Gmail's spam filter works excellently, so I won't buy an argument that "it isn't possible".

      But the best thing I could suggest to someone concerned about false positives is simply to stay off Twitter. I think I clicked a Twitter link maybe twice on accident during the course of my life. I have all their scripts blocked on every other site. I don't feel any worse off (to say the least) and haven't regretted a day of it. My concern, then, is where OTHER people's idiotic decisions begin to affect ME. That is when we start needing to establish rules and enforcement. That seems to be the point we are fast approaching with social media. At a minimum we need total transparency and responsibility at Twitter, to analyze the situation. We do not have that. If they do not want us to have that, it frankly needs to be taken by force.

  3. Of Course by chromaexcursion · · Score: 1

    Twitter doesn't want to fix the problem.
    It would affect their ad revenue.
    Idiots watch ads.

    1. Re: Of Course by sound+vision · · Score: 1

      I wonder if any of these bots are clicking on ads as well. That'd be a great "gentleman's agreement" between the two crooked parties that would require no direct communication and preserve plausible deniability at Twitter.

  4. People want to publish by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Ads are generated by users doing publishing.
    People reading and seeing ads, What they do after the ads on that site.
    Become a utility to pass on ads and let people publish.
    Censorship makes the brand become a publisher of approved content.
    Users look for US brands that offer freedom of speech and freedom after speech.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  5. Twitter is nothing but a PR/propagand tool by oldgraybeard · · Score: 1

    Celebrities, media persons, corporations, criminal organizations, dictators, government organizations and politicians have whole staffs dedicated to managing the twitter PR/propaganda tool.
    Well except President Trump and Elon Musk but that is a different issue ;) lol

    I have never seen a use for twitter and have no clue why anyone would have an account or care what is said there. but that is just me

    Just my 2 cents ;)

  6. What is the motivation? Cheap credibility! by shanen · · Score: 2

    Question: What is the underlying motivation for creating fake Twitter accounts?

    Answer: Cheap credibility. A fresh sock puppet looks just about the same as any other identity on Twitter.

    Yes, there's a slight advantage to the accounts with the little blue checked circle, but not much considering the sock puppets can use similar names and there will be plenty of fools who overlook the circle that isn't there.

    The generalized solution approach is to reduce the value of the fake accounts. One way to do that would involve MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) as a way to render most identities much less visible until AFTER they earned some more credibility. One of the dimensions should be age, by the way. If the fake accounts start at 0 on all dimensions, but the visibility threshold is just slightly above 0, then they have disappeared (except to each other or to people who want to change the defaults to play with them).

    MEPR should be an opt-in metric, of course, though even that is kind of complicated. The degree of participation should be controllable, but essentially you should be able to earn visibility by being a nice person and lose it for being a troll. It might even motivate some people to be nicer to become more visible, eh?

    Anyway, enough time spent for now, so I bid you the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.

    --
    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  7. Here is as good a place as any. by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    They've suddenly locked my account and told me I MUST validate with a cell phone text message.

    Does anyone know a reliable web text service which allows me to do this, that isn't on their "do not trust" list? Preferable in western country.

    1. Re:Here is as good a place as any. by tepples · · Score: 1

      I'm guessing based on your comment that your phone is POTS or VoIP, I assume, and you currently do not subscribe to mobile phone service. Am I right? If so, have you emailed Twitter about inability to receive a code at your phone number?

    2. Re:Here is as good a place as any. by Cederic · · Score: 1

      I got back from holiday and decided to try creating a twitter account. Created the account, validated my email, updated my profile.

      They locked it as 'suspicious' while I was trying to write my first message, in which I'd used no controversial words.

      So no, they're not getting my phone number. I don't trust them.

  8. Twitter is on top of it by mnemotronic · · Score: 1

    Yea, a couple corn-pone yahoos from Iowa with woefully incomplete information and not knowing the inner workings of the platform somehow managed to identify robo-spammers a whole lot faster the we did, but they don't have to go to all the meetings that we do. Personally, I have 2 standups daily to review our deep-tanning, AI driven excuse generator. Plus a full face meeting for minimization strategies when dealing with media. That only leaves 4 hours for my workout & massage at the company gym and an espresso break. Sheesh.

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
  9. Fucking Twitter.. by pigsycyberbully · · Score: 1

    Twitter for twits which is a English expression for a foolish person or more than one twit(s). What a bunch of twits!
    Perhaps they should have used old English witan = wise man although I think the expression man or mankind has been banned in the U.S., and it is now person kind?

    I have to be very careful of mixing with northerners, or any of the outer see towns in the U.K. I pick up accents without realising it.
    I had to speak more than one dialect when I was a child when I ( spoke ) to my ( da ) dad ( wheres your wee fella your da ).
    And my mother's language at the same time. All the little kids used to say why does your accent change when you speak to your dad. And I was not aware of it.

    It gave me a problem later in life as in I can adopt other people's accents without realising it. People always ask me where do you come from? I should have gone to a voice teacher years ago to stop this from happening.

    My elderly patients love me though their face lights up even if they are very ill thinking that I am one of ( theirs ) as in a local . They even ask for me. Other people keep on saying what? It takes about half-hour to wear off. I really should do something about it...

    That was a long story just to say I hate ( Twitter ) the bots are relentless on everybody's post. I can understand Facebook, lots of elderly women sit at their kitchen table with a laptop on Facebook, I come across them all the time as part of my work it stops them from feeling isolated.

    But fucking Twitter what a stupid waste of time...

  10. Hot take by yuriklastalov · · Score: 1

    Hot take: All Twitter accounts are junk accounts. CMV

  11. CAPTCHA Anyone? by rv6502 · · Score: 1

    It shows they're not trying at all. They WANT inflated user numbers. It's good for the stocks, it's good for selling ads.

  12. what a bunch of idiots by slashmydots · · Score: 1

    Ooh build AI and have human moderator and...wait, just go to Google, type in terms someone would if they wanted to bot subs for money, buy the service, target a dummy post, ban every single account that interacted with the dummy post. Done. 100% kill rate.