It might turn into a game of cat-and-mouse, but Twitter just hasn't been much of a cat so far. Finding large bot networks is pretty easy according to the researchers who do it all the time. https://bahrainwatch.org/amanatech/en/investigations/we-dema... https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10844-017-0494-...

No, it isn't. It's not easy at all.

The researchers who keep publishing these papers and the patsies in the media who keep repeating them are not identifying bots, in fact they can't know what their own accuracy is because they don't have any way to force verification of accounts. But it's apparent from reading their work that they're usually just identifying humans.

I used to do anti-bot detection and anti-spam work for Google, and have written a takedown of one of these media articles about Twitter bots:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

The paper I studied was riddled with nonsense, fraudulent claims, claims that didn't match their own data, abuse of logic and statistics and massive political bias. It is typical for this space.

This is especially true because real bots (vs the bots that exist in the imagination of political journalists and academics) usually want to sell things. They're quite boring. They aren't engaged in "propaganda". The belief that spammers are spending lots of time and money trying to flood Twitter with political opinions isn't grounded in any sort of reality, and frequently leads to embarrassing claims, like this guy who was pegged as a "Russian bot" but who turned out to be a carpark attendant in Glasgow:

https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll...

These claims about spambots should be seen in the context of a US political campaign in which the losers seemed to be struggling to understand why their preferred candidate lost. The idea that the population has been bulk brainwashed through Twitter doesn't have any basis in psychology or computer science, but is an attractive way to avoid engaging with policy issues.

Verifying humans is a solved problem.

Not really. You come up with a method and someone will come up with a way of factory-farming their way around it.

Even assuming this is so, what's to prevent BotCo from hiring some humans to click through the process for each bot account?

Please fill us in.

I share your skepticism.

CAPTCHAs are at best a game of cat-and-mouse, and are always open to relay attacks anyway.

You can still verify in-person, and even check documents, but no web company would even consider doing that, even for something like an optional 'fully verified account' tag.

Even something like checking a phone number just means that you're limiting the number of legitimate "bots" or alternate accounts people can have.

Indeed, that's a good way to raise the bar.

For small websites, even a completely trivial email check is enough to keep out most spammers.

Yeah, that sounds practical for every start-up that needs to do human validation.