Bots are invading Twitter

[Captain77W]

‘Botmageddon’: Surge in anonymous Asia Twitter accounts sparks fears of social media manipulation

22 April 2018 10:59

5 min read

It has been being jokingly referred to as “Botmageddon”. But a surge in new, anonymous Twitter accounts across swathes of Southeast and East Asia has deepened fears the region is in the throes of US-style mass social media manipulation.

Maya Gilliss-Chapman, a Cambodian tech entrepreneur currently working in Silicon Valley, noticed something odd was happening in early April.

Her Twitter account @MayaGC was being swamped by a daily deluge of follows from new users.

“I acquired well over 1,000 new followers since the beginning of March. So, that’s approximately a 227 percent increase in just a month,” she told AFP.

While many might delight in such a popularity spike, Gilliss-Chapman, who has previously worked for tech companies to root out spam, was immediately suspicious.

The vast majority of these new accounts contained no identifying photograph and had barely tweeted since their creation.

But they all seemed to be following prominent Twitter users in Cambodia including journalists, business figures, academics and celebrities. .....

 

The rest of the article is linked below 

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/04/22/botmageddon-surge-anonymous-asia-twitter-accounts-sparks-fears-social-media-manipulation/

 

 

 

[ItsMitch]

This isn't new lol, it's been happening for months. 

[BlueCrazii]

You mean years

[Captain77W]

These are new accounts that have appeared recently specifically following Asian politicians and other prominent people. 

[SansVarnic]

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[asus killer]

like so many American bad examples this too was destined to spread. 

[Captain77W]

14 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

@Captain77W your topic does not meet the guidelines for posting in the TNR section. Please review the guidelines linked below and update as needed or your post will be either removed from the TNR or locked.

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I apologize and I will correct this mistake immediately! 

[Guest The Viking]

It isn't new to have a bunch of bots around, but it's annoying that Twitter & other social networks (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc) aren't doing anything against it. Common, how difficult is it to spot a bot from a regular account? Just send a verification email regularly or require a certain amount of activity or something and lock the account if nobody's using it.

 

We can all spot a bot account from a regular account: no activity, no pictures, no dumb stuff in the user description (on twitter in this case), weird follows, etc. Surely these companies can invest some of the money they make off from us to clean their platforms, no?

 

"ohhh but censoring!!!" what censoring? they are private platforms anyway. If they lock your account by mistake, just have a procedure to unlock it, and done.

[samcool55]

55 minutes ago, The Viking said:

It isn't new to have a bunch of bots around, but it's annoying that Twitter & other social networks (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc) aren't doing anything against it. Common, how difficult is it to spot a bot from a regular account? Just send a verification email regularly or require a certain amount of activity or something and lock the account if nobody's using it.

 

We can all spot a bot account from a regular account: no activity, no pictures, no dumb stuff in the user description (on twitter in this case), weird follows, etc. Surely these companies can invest some of the money they make off from us to clean their platforms, no?

 

"ohhh but censoring!!!" what censoring? they are private platforms anyway. If they lock your account by mistake, just have a procedure to unlock it, and done.

Sadly the anti-bot stuff from twitter is already too brutal, i have 3 twitter accounts with 0 activity and they all got banned instantly.

No picture, no followers, no description, nothing, just a brand new empty account and all of them got banned in seconds without me doing a single thing.

 

They keep asking for my phone number to call me to verify it but if that's what they want just to have a working account at all they can f*ck off.

Also it didn't tell me from where they were going to call me so if it was from overseas it would be expensive AF as well...

[AshleyAshes]

29 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Also it didn't tell me from where they were going to call me so if it was from overseas it would be expensive AF as well...

Uhm... Why do you think that the RECIPIENT would pay to receive an over seas call...?

[Lurick]

It always amazes me the people that always claim it's "just so easy to do (blah)" and "why isn't company X doing something to stop (blah)". They are doing something and they have technology in place to stop it, doesn't mean that it's perfect or will always work. Like the music/movie industry thinks that google has some magic wand to wave and make all copyright infringing material just disappear from their search results, people think social media just has a magic wand to make bots, and only bots, just magically go poof. Stop thinking it's just so simple and easy to stop this stuff.

 

How do you expect a company to magically program something that removes "bad" or "offending" content/accounts in an effective manner that doesn't have casualties and doesn't upset someone because they think the content removed wasn't bad and is just "the other guy" trying to censor them. AI has been proven to not be able to do it, bot automation is simple and easy and can churn out millions of accounts in no time flat but determining an inactive account from a bot account from some random dude who signed up isn't that easy. You either find a way to automate the process and hire a TON of people to review it, or you hope your program is "good enough" to get most of it.

 

The twitter bot mess, the Facebook problems, etc. aren't going away and they are actively trying to work to stop this stuff but how much money should they be pressured into throwing at it? They could throw every dollar they have at the problem and still not come close to creating a solution that works in the long term.

[Guest The Viking]

51 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Sadly the anti-bot stuff from twitter is already too brutal, i have 3 twitter accounts with 0 activity and they all got banned instantly.

No picture, no followers, no description, nothing, just a brand new empty account and all of them got banned in seconds without me doing a single thing.

 

They keep asking for my phone number to call me to verify it but if that's what they want just to have a working account at all they can f*ck off.

Also it didn't tell me from where they were going to call me so if it was from overseas it would be expensive AF as well...

you're not the only one, I had the exact same issue long time ago. That's what I don't get. Why do WE, the legit accounts get banned, while the bot ones don't? I managed to get it back 3 weeks after and ended up just closing it because screw them, but bots are just there happily resharing bunchs of random/fake content?

[Lurick]

8 minutes ago, The Viking said:

you're not the only one, I had the exact same issue long time ago. That's what I don't get. Why do WE, the legit accounts get banned, while the bot ones don't? I managed to get it back 3 weeks after and ended up just closing it because screw them, but bots are just there happily resharing bunchs of random/fake content?

 

The below is hypothetical and assumes quite a bit but just take a minute to read and think about it.

 

I'm going to take YouTube as an example here. There are tons of bot generated videos and comments all over the place but on average a total of 300 HOURS of content are uploaded EVERY MINUTE to the platform, legit and fake combined. How on earth are they supposed to effectively police that much stuff? If you had to have someone watch it, you would need 18,000 people just to watch content 24/7. Assume three shifts of people who watch content nonstop for 8 hours per day and you're looking at just 54,000 employees alone and at just $10/hr that's ~$1.1 Billion dollars per year in wages alone. That doesn't include anything else or anyone else, no managers, no buildings, no infrastructure, no benefits, nothing but a base salary. But wait, what about someone to review that stuff they flag, surely someone watching nonstop videos isn't going to get it all right all the time. Well there's another ~10,000 people to check on that footage so add another $208 million.

 

So at this point we're at about 65,000 people being hired. Now we need managers all along the chain so that's about 1,000 people (if you think 100 people per manager is reasonable) there but you can't pay them the base pay, assume an average of $25/hr for management, that's another $52 million. Then you need to factor in the cost to train all of these people, let some of them go, hire more new people to fill in, have a stream of additional people to back-fill those who are sick, those who quit, etc. Cost to train people on how to take down or flag content will cost you time, plus the cost of the trainers themselves.

 

This is VERY quickly adding up to nearly $1.5 billion per year in cost and we still haven't factored in anything beyond base salary, no bonuses, no vacation time, no health, nothing else. That can easily cost 30% of a person's salary or more, then you have to factor in all the HR people you need, finance, etc. just to deal with all these new people. Sure you can contract some of that out but realistically you're going to have to hire, train, etc a bunch of other people in all sorts of other roles too. Assume benefits are 30% of the salary cost and that you need to pay out another $500 million for all the non-direct hires and whatnot. You're looking at about $2.6 billion per year, then you need to figure out if you're going to have buildings for them, let them work remote, etc. and factor in the costs of all that, building maintenance, etc. and very quickly you could be looking at $3 billion or more per year, and that's assuming the volume doesn't grow. In revenue YouTube made $4 billion, you take on a $3 billion+, and probably growing, yearly expense and they are in some serious trouble.

[Taf the Ghost]

3 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

This isn't new lol, it's been happening for months. 

 

3 hours ago, BlueCrazii said:

You mean years

First major rollout of bots was around 2012. That was a bunch of the Pro-China ones. The Pro-Russia ones show up in 2014 for what happened with Ukraine. The modern ones are run out of India & Romania, with much of the Political ones controlled out of DC. 

 

If you're on the active parts of social media, you can actually time when they're active. Their keyword detection is getting really advanced as well. If you have more than 5k followers on Twitter, you can summon a whole host of bots with specific phrases. Most Social Media is actually astroturf now, because the entire Media, itself, is an astroturfing operation.

[Delicieuxz]

36 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

First major rollout of bots was around 2012. That was a bunch of the Pro-China ones.

It might go even earlier than that, as the US had a $200 million social media propaganda program already in 2010. And Israel had a social media propaganda program in 2008 to influence public opinion during their war on Gaza - but no word on whether that involved bots. These days, both the US and Israeli social media propaganda programs have massively scaled upwards from what they were back then.

 

We hear a lot of hype about alleged bots from other countries (though a lot of those accused of being foreign bots over the years have been proven to be merely honest Western citizens - like was the case just recently with @Partisangirl and @Ian56789), but I wonder how much of that is to deflect from the public catching on that there could be loads of US bots everywhere.

 

Everyone that frustrates Western propaganda gets called a bot or a foreign troll. And calling people those things is a part of Western propaganda.

 

https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/987543855510708225

 

https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/987386740104036352

 

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/987635972144680960

 

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/988166498035187712

 

The Guardian, “Russian bots” and the dehumanisation of dissent

 

 

https://www.rt.com/uk/409967-russian-troll-scottish-guard/

 

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x5mma/twitter-told-congress-this-random-american-is-a-russian-propaganda-troll

 

https://medium.com/@politicspeach/ive-been-labeled-a-russian-troll-by-twitter-what-do-i-do-next-a9687c162ffe

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

It might go even earlier than that, as the US had a $200 million social media propaganda program already in 2010. And Israel had a social media propaganda program in 2008 to influence public opinion during their war on Gaza - but no word on whether that involved bots. These days, both the US and Israeli social media propaganda programs have massively scaled upwards from what they were back then.

 

We hear a lot of hype about alleged bots from other countries (though a lot of those accused of being foreign bots over the years have been proven to be Western citizens - like was the case just recently with @Partisangirl and @Ian56789), but I wonder how much of that is to deflect from the public catching on that there could be loads of US bots everywhere.

 

Everyone that frustrates Western propaganda gets called a bot.

 

 

https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/987543855510708225

 

The first big one was actually 2011 during the Arab Spring, which I forgot about because it was much more of a combined operation. You use the Astroturf to get people really making things on their own. The Western Nation-States don't seem to have rolled out bot systems until a bit later, at least on Social Media.

 

On poisoning Comments Sections, Blogs or Forums, that goes back to the 1990s. They needed modern scanning technology to really handle the speed of Social Media.

[BuckGup]

Twitter people still use that?

[captain_to_fire]

Which reminds me https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll-factory.html

 

[Okjoek]

 

[Granular]

It's only logical that social media would get taken over by bots.

Computers are much more efficient at producing lots of journal data no person is interested in reading, which is also much better digestable by data mining algorithms. I don't know why I didn't think of piping my server's syslog to twitter before.

[Delicieuxz]

Yet another officially accused 'Russian troll' that turns out to not be Russian or a troll: https://www.rt.com/uk/424858-russian-troll-bot-msm/

 

Just like the accused 'Russian troll' says, as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a single accused 'Russian troll' or 'Russian bot' that actually turned out to be a Russian anything.

 

Calling people Russian trolls or Russian bots is a part of UK and US propaganda to control narratives by manipulating and misleading people away from discovering how much the US and UK governments and their media are lying to the public. And they certainly are lying a whole lot about a whole lot of things.

 

Also, ironically about the accuser of that person, Ben Nimmo, is themselves literally a US state-funded paid propaganda troll that works hard for Atlantic Council (a US state-funded propaganda organization) to spread disinformation about Russia and other topics.

 

Atlantic Council is also one of the groups associated with the discredited and disgraced joint CIA-Ukrainian state propaganda outlet, PropOrNot, which laughably accused every media outlet which didn't parrot CIA anti-Russia propaganda as Russian - before being swiftly dumped by the public and every Western news outlet that wanted to salvage its own reputation while it still had the chance. PorN's list and McCarthyism was produced and spread in cooperation with some US propaganda rags, such as Daily Beast.

 

http://yournewswire.com/propornot-cia-ukrainian-operation/

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/28/unpacking-the-shadowy-outfit-behind-2017s-biggest-fake-news-story/

https://steemit.com/news/@fortified/fake-news-or-how-the-atlantic-council-promoted-anti-russian-propaganda

 

It seems that the more conviction these neo-psychopaths put into their judgments (whether it's that somebody is a Russian bot / troll, or that a geopolitical rival is using chemical weapons, that a country has WMDs, or whatever else), the more they turn out to be wrong. By their determinations, psychopaths have collapsed their minds' consideration and so have made themselves incapable of perceiving truth.

 

The Guardian, “Russian bots” and the dehumanisation of dissent

[matrix07012]

I'm apparently a bot.