Researchers Discover Massive Networks of Fake Twitter Accounts (bbc.com) 91
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.
Why? (Score:3)
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?
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Re: Why? (Score:1)
You may not have a tweek but you certainly have a twat
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I'm guessing that your name isn't Chad.
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I follow no accounts, on no topics - nor do I have a single tweet. Nor do I have an account. In fact, I don't even get the point of twitter. Insert twit joke.
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To win elections (Score:3)
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Yea, Trump got elected because of all those Star Wars quotes.
It's kind of pathetic how everything these days gets turned into a stab at Trump. The term paranoid raving lunatics comes to mind.
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One can only hope that they'll eventually get over the butt hurt affront to their SJW psyche and move on with their lives. It was funny for a couple of days, but now it's just tiresome.
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Its all Obamas fault anyway. If he hadn't been so spineless he would have declared the Russian infiltration of US politics an act of war and voided the election.
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Wasn't Obama largely elected on Twitter as well? I seem to remember that he was considered hip because he used Twitter. I find it funny that demographically the same people are complaining about Trump now. (I realize that not literally the same people are complaining, it is just shorthand...)
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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.
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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.
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Just make sure the woman is cool with it, like the President did, and there will be no issues. Except maybe millions of women will march on their local city to complain about how sexist you are for being a heterosexual male.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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#MAGA
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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 h
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And those 35,000 twitter-bots spam a message to all the other twitter bots, fake accounts, and the occasional IRL tardface who owns a twitter account.
I still don't see the point.
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If the politicians and celebrities are boring or their projects fail, happy people can be found online to create interest and keep the numbers up.
Re:The only question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fake accounts supporting average celebrities on social media is just something that adds to the fake fame.
some are spammers (Score:3)
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Hands off. That's my fiancee.
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The internet. Where the women are men and the children are FBI agents.
"The jig is up!" yelled Kris Jenner (Score:2)
"Take the secret plane to the island. It's already loaded with the gold. MOVE!!"
Took you long enough (Score:2, Funny)
And I'll bet you thought Russia was doing this with real accounts?
I know I want a twitter bot army (Score:1)
350,000 accounts, only posts from Windows Phone (Score:3)
I can't imagine how they make that work with so few of the actual devices in use.
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emulation on a VM farm.
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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.
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...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.
So.... (Score:2)
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?
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Twitter is a social app.
The value of the platform is directly tied to how many users they supposedly have for advertising/data-mining purposes.
There goes breitbart's numbers (Score:3)
Mmmmh (Score:2)
"messages being posted only from Windows phones"
Both of them?
Pretty sure I have one of those (Score:2)
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
My God (Score:2)
I am a bot, and I did not even know, the horror...
Screwed Again (Score:1)
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So (Score:2)
tweets coming from places where nobody lives; messages being posted only from Windows phones; exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels.
So, Windows Developers...