Likely, they don't really care to stop it. Real people still use it enough that the advertisers don't really mind.

I'd suppose that they cannot really tell the difference between a bot and a real person, at least at scale.

I follow a few non-English speaking hashtags that act as local news sources for their areas. These hashtags have been active for a few years. Though Twitter has a lot of policies for English twitter, these languages really have no policies. By that I mean they live-stream executions, have drug sales, solicit sex-work, etc. Illegal isn't really a thing in these places to begin with. That said, these cases are somewhat rare and these hashtags are mostly used as genuine news sources. Granted, these are 'edge case' languages, but still, it's a free for all that Twitter doesn't care to dive into.

Based on the 'extreme' cases and their long lived incoherence to Twitter policy, it's not hard to conclude that Twitter really does not care to enforce policies unless forced to.

Geoff Goldberg has been analyzing and writing about this a lot[0], he is worth following on Medium, ironically Twitter suspending him from Twitter [1].

[0] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg [1] https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/your-twitter-account-has-be...

He was harassing users over his dubious research. Suspecting someone to be a "bot" doesn't justify demeaning and dehumanizing these people.

The point of these bots isn't to spread disinformation or to amplify political content (the article is wrong about this).

The point of these bots is to build up an account with credible behavior that you can use to make money (usually by scamming advertisers into buying paid tweets/followers, or by directly promoting scam products).

Political twitter is so formulaic and high volume that bot/sweatshop posts don't seem out of place compared to the usual traffic from real accounts.

If there were no politics on twitter they'd just send formulaic messages about pop culture or sports or something.

You make a bold claim, do you have any supporting evidence?

Wasn't this somewhat well documented during 2016 where most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg but teens from south-eastern Europe making money from ads and therefore driving clickbait to its limit because they literally just wanted clicks?

>most of it wasn't some coordinated attack from St. Petersburg

This is completely false. A cursory search will yield results explaining Russia's massive effort on social media (and Twitter in particular) to interfere in the election.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-elec...

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Ru...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...

etc....

Not sure if "completely false" is appropriate. There was some Russian activity. The scale of which appears somewhat underwhelming:

> Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.

If that small of an effort can make that much of an impact on the core democratic process, then we need to consider a significant scale back of XXI century globalism to allow for second half of XX century democracy to survive. Not a popular opinion on a tech forum, where more users means more money, and there are always significantly more users outside one's national boundaries. Sigh.

>Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.

The comparison of "50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content" to "the total accounts on Twitter at the time" makes no sense at all. It seems intended to mislead.

It would be more informative to know how many total accounts tweeted about the election, or how many politically active twitter accounts that bot army reached.

And in general, the election was decided by ~80,000 people [1]. To think that ~50,000 bots spamming Twitter with non-stop propaganda had no impact on that is extremely naive (especially when you consider that Twitter was just one piece in the overall interference).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

Using a very rough ballpark estimate, it costs $1 / month to run a twitter bot using readily available technology, see, for example, https://jarvee.com/get-now pricing list. To think that for $50k / month anyone in the world can have a [significant?] impact on US elections is bizarre.

In practice, there is a negligible probability that posting a tweet from a random bot will end up in the feeds for a target demographic. The feed space of the 80k people WP claims decide the election is finite, and it costs significantly more money to reach them than setting up small scale botnets. Ultimately, Twitter is in control of the feeds, and it's their business model to happily direct any message from the highest bidder to the critical demographic, regardless of who or where the highest bidder is.

Most of those 80K voters weren't active Twitter users so your analysis is invalid.

In comparison, Mike Bloomberg totally failed to take over a US presidential primary, and he spent almost half a billion dollars.

That article says 50,000 accounts were "linked to Russia". Do you know who linked them to Russia and by what criteria? They weren't actually controlled by the Russian government because the article cites that figure at only 3,000.

The hysteria over Russia as an excuse to ignore the concerns of Americans who support populist positions is pretty transparent at this point.

>The hysteria over Russia as an excuse to ignore the concerns of Americans who support populist positions is pretty transparent at this point.

You're calling it "hysteria" to dismiss facts you don't like. "The Russian Hoax!", where have I heard that before?

But, to your second point, I completely agree that many on the left want to pretend it was _mostly_ because of foreign interference. I tend to think that had a pretty small impact, and the fact you pointed out is probably much more consequential: Americans are more receptive to a populist message than people think.

I 'like' it so much (not really) when people from the USA say/write "left" when they have absolutely no idea what left/communism is, apart from what they HEAR. I don't think that more than 1mil people in the USA have lived in the USSR block or the countries of their influence, or have studied communism thoroughly.

And you can recognize the trolls when one says/writes "Left" in the most capitalistic country on this planet. And by "Left" they mean the very minimal/basic social services, such as don't let people lose two legs but only one because the $1k insurance per month doesn't cover that. I wonder how failed is the USA when countries in EU have achieved that with $100 contributions per month. Miracle!!!

Americans live with the dream that they are all billionaire but somebody is blocking them (the commies, the socialists, the left, the Cubans, the anarchists, and in general "they" some without ID).

Russia always plays the looooong game, they try and succeed to sabotage a little bit every step of the way (antivaxers, interference with elections, oil price), you name it, they are in it.

I think I vented/ranted enough. I sometimes feel sorry for the 30-40% of USA citizens, they are confused and haven't read more than 10 books in their lives.. it's a potty for such a prosperous coubtry to suffer like this.

>And by "Left" they mean the very minimal/basic social services, such as don't let people lose two legs but only one because the $1k insurance per month doesn't cover that. I wonder how failed is the USA when countries in EU have achieved that with $100 contributions per month. Miracle!!!

This isn't really true. You're going to get medical help with an urgent medical issue in any developed country, even if you don't have a penny to your name. Doctors/hospitals cannot turn you away for not having money.

There are also very few countries in the EU where insurance payments are $100. The only country I could think of would be Bulgaria and that's because they're the poorest EU country. Virtually everywhere else you're going to pay more than that and everybody has to pay it, including the poor. Depending on the country, if you don't pay that then you won't get medical care (other than the urgent kind) in those countries either.

The US has a lousy health insurance system. The cost is too high, insurance paperwork is ridiculous, and insurance doesn't always even cover you. But healthcare really isn't as amazing in most EU countries as you want to think. Many of them have similar problems.

In the EU, free (at point of use) healthcare is available to all residents, including the unemployed. In several countries, you can get free treatment immediately even if you are not a resident.

That's a lot different from the USA, where tens of thousands of people die from lack of health insurance, and probably hundreds of thousands are bankrupted by the healthcare they get.

A quarter or more Americans put off seeking medical treatment because of the cost. By the time they seek treatment, it may be too late. I'm reminded of a carpenter who won $1 million and said he could finally go to see a doctor. He died a few weeks later from cancer.

A lot of Americans are one accident or illness away from financial ruin and poverty.

For all their problems, Europeans are a lot better off than this.

More than 26 000 Americans die each year because of lack of health insurance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2323087/

New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...

The Americans dying because they can't afford medical care https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

More Americans Delaying Medical Treatment Due to Cost https://news.gallup.com/poll/269138/americans-delaying-medic...

Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.3049...

Medical Bankruptcy Is Killing The American Middle Class https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/medical-bankruptcy-killing-a...

New York carpenter who won $1 million lottery prize dies of stage-4 cancer weeks later https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/02/lottery...

N.Y. man dies from cancer 3 weeks after winning $1M lottery https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

I purposely left spaces between the different "sections" of my semi-long post, just to separate the items/topics. The post I was replying was too 'thick' (imho) and I was just disentangling that spaghetti. (Russia, Left, caring for the fellow human/social reforms, illiteracy).

Not to be too pedantic, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think "The Russian Hoax" more specifically refers to the beliefs/claims by some that Trump or his campaign was colluding with Russia directly to interfere with the election rather than simply the belief/claim/fact that Russia (or Russians) interfered in the election of their own volition.

They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially.

Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.

> but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations.

If the growth is largely from bots, then perhaps Elliot Management is right even if you disagree with the business dealings.

There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument.

Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

it might be awesome, if the signature is somewhat obvious, to have an independent entity flagging / creating a suspected bots database?

_maybe_ that would put some pressure on Twitter?

    https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer
    https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf 
    https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscore

But they're making money from it. And that's all they (and their shareholders) care about. Same reason FakeBook won't ban false political advertising on their platform even though it's really obvious it's destructive to society.

And how exactly do you propose to stop this on scale? The problem is harder than it looks.

I wouldn't begin to claim I have a solution, but I think there's steps Twitter can take to show they are acting in good faith. I believe often times, Twitter flags accounts for suspicious activity - for accounts to be reactivated, a phone number has to be provided. If Twitter wanted to, are they not capable of deploying an algorithm that serves as a dragnet to catch accounts that tick off multiple check-boxes for bot activity and flag them? This would not mean that the account would immediately be banned or shadow-banned, but they could provide some kind of visual indicator to other users that the account in question has recently been flagged for bot-like activity (on the account's comments, retweets, etc.).

There are many real humans who have no phone number.

Or would never give it to Twitter.

Because number of users is a nice pr metric. Just pretend the 15% which are bots are real, and pretend the 15% of suspended and abandoned accounts are active.

I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change.

I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.

> I've been writing about this for years but it's insane to me that Twitter is not stopping this.

If it doesn't impact shareholders' profits, it goes to the bottom of the to-do list.

How else will the populist cults survive?! /s

Gotta keep those MAU counts up!

Do you believe the same thing about email spam detection? Various authorities decide on the validity of email and webspam.

If people pick companies to do filtering for them, it is their choice. GMail is causing some problems. In general, most people opt to have suspicious mail sorted into a Spam folder, not deleted completely.

Available evidence doesn't support your claims.

It's a big topic and I am reluctant to invest a great deal of time trying to persuade a new arrival. Try following the links in this article for an overview of recent research.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-twitter-bots-...

http://wondermark.com/1k62/ seems apropos.

I've been on HN for 13 years, I just don't care for the voting system.