Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

Re:Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting T... by jordan801 on Monday March 19, 2018 @09:41AM (#16618249)

Isn't this self defeating? As everyone has pointed out, it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it? Maybe their review and moderation team is just too backed up. In that case, instead of helping the twitter team, these detection bots, are probably making it worse. Reviews and considerations have to be more thorough, since most of the reports are from automated systems. Systems, they probably have already engineered.

I built a chrome plugin that filtered out Facebook posts by a set of keywords. It took less than an hour. Maybe these "hackers" should do it for Twitter. It would reduce the load on the moderators, while making these bots far less effective. Then, reach out to the Twitter team, and see if there's a way to go about this, that isn't destructive.

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Re:Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting T... by Bartweiss on Monday March 19, 2018 @10:34AM (#16618604)

> it's not hard to detect a bot. So, why can't Twitter just do it?

Presumably a significant part of that is that Twitter cares more about false positives than random third parties do; they're going to get some vicious criticism if they start flagging/closing real accounts as bots. They might also worry more about false negatives, because as soon as they act on bots they'll be accused of bias and only targeting certain positions. (That accusation will hit regardless, but presumably they'd like it to not be true.)

It's easy to whip up a tool that gets lots of true positives, but much harder to get a success rate good enough to use.

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