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Hackers Are So Fed Up With Twitter Bots They're Hunting Them Down Themselves (theintercept.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the you-had-one-job dept.
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.
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Hackers Are So Fed Up With Twitter Bots They're Hunting Them Down Themselves More

Hackers Are So Fed Up With Twitter Bots They're Hunting Them Down Themselves

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  • Missing context (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    and like any other slashdotter, seeing attractive women made him immediately stare at his feet and scream REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  • Outlaw porn, while letting the real criminals, the online scammers who cheat people out of money, the murders, go free.

  • What did you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PmanAce ( 1679902 ) on Monday March 19, 2018 @10:13AM (#56283641) Homepage
    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?

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by c ( 8461 ) <beauregardcp@gmail.com> on Monday March 19, 2018 @10:25AM (#56283689)

    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?

  • I am doing that (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fabiomb ( 5315421 ) on Monday March 19, 2018 @10:37AM (#56283747)
    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 ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

      A "Fake Account" that has a human behind it is not a fake account. If your premise is correct then your Slashdot "fabiomb" account is by your definition "fake".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gnick ( 1211984 )

        Using an alias is not the same as registering using someone else's credentials.

      • an alias is not an fake account, is an alias, if you have 200 aliases in Slashdot, 199 are probably fake accounts... or not, that's the problem here, how you identify a fake user...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most fake human accounts are easy to detect with a simple reverse image search on Google. They almost always just steal a profile image, from real social media users or from fake account packs that people on 4chan put together.

      The other dead giveaway is copy/pasted messages and links. Those guys are not that original, it seems.

      • this not always work but is very usfeul, Facebook does a good job at it (that's a use of the face detection algorithm they have), but, for example, many fake facebook accounts use pictures from VK and are not in FB, so they can't detect it. Twitter simply does nothing, they let anyone steal pictures and names from real users.
    • The real problem is social media itself...your efforts are very noble and valiant, but ultimately useless. Like evolution, the prey/predator will always evolve to outwit the predator/prey. The good news is that extinction for both is not a tragedy, but instead a necessity!

  • ... it's made out to be.

    It's a depressing shitstorm rabbit hole and not one fucking person is unaware of that.

    The people writing code to spot bots already know how to ID the bots, right?

    Just navigate around the bastards (or bitches as may apply).

    • 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 mor

      • I am well aware of the rapid thread degradation and I question the utility of clicking on that hastag in the first place, knowing it will turn to shit in 1 ... 2 ... 3 ...

      • THIS is one of the main problems: the noise

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by eaglesrule ( 4607947 )

        'Trending' is whatever Twitter decides suits their sensibilities and therefore you should be allowed to see. So the signal to noise ratio is even lower than you think.

        And just in case something interesting does get said on Twitter amidst the bot spam and greasy food picts, it will be subjected to Twitter's political purity tests. [wired.com]

        So even as a communication medium, Twitter is unreliable unless one has enough outside influence or political capital to make being deplatformed a hassle for them.

        I'm not seein

  • If you can't hunt down a few thousand each day, you're low on the leaderboards ...

  • ...as I know that http://flowingdata.com/2018/03... [flowingdata.com] this simple algorithm classifies my twitter feed as distinctly a 'bot'.

    No, I don't use it much - I've used it to subscribe to a WWI history feed and the Onion, that's it.

    In the years since Twitter started, I've posted a grand total of 123 tweets.

  • bots are like any other script, are either a benefit or a hazard

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