Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/twitter-abuse-tools/

by redraga • 9 years ago

81 152 9 years ago

Today, the egg, tomorrow, unverified account names. Are they going full Facebook?

And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that's ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don't necessarily like is part of being an adult.

tptacek• 9 years ago

No, giving people the option of not seeing patterns of accounts isn't "full Facebook".

sarvinc• 9 years ago

Sure but harassment isn't. My understanding is that all of this is optional. As long as anonymous accounts are not abused there's no reason to filter them out. If anonymous accounts are abused people will filter them out. Thus the only people we have to blame are the abusers of anonymous accounts.

eropple10• 9 years ago

Having concerted bombs of right-wing harassment drop on one's head for having the temerity to do something like "be a woman with political opinions" is not part of being an adult. And that's the reality of Twitter right now.

This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.

iamatworknow13• 9 years ago

The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation.

As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them.

Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?

tomjen34• 9 years ago

Do you think Twitter should have a shared default blocklist?

That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big).

Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.

intoverflow25• 9 years ago

including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me"

How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?

moonshinefe• 9 years ago

I believe what he was getting at is as an adult, you should be able to realize that a website on the internet is just that--and have the ability to take it with a grain of salt without being highly offended / outraged.

I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.

FussyZeus2• 9 years ago

Where've you been? Twitter's been trying to become Facebook for years.

tomjen34• 9 years ago

Please show me an intelligent left-wing and an intelligent-right wing person, both of consistently post well reasoned and well argued content from their perspectives.

It doesn't matter what side they are on, all that gets shared on twitter that would qualify as political is absolutely nauseating waving that sides flag and telling the world how stupid the other side is.

It would be better if it was blocked, preferably by default.

m-p-3• 9 years ago

They're Digg-ing themselves.

wildpeaks• 9 years ago

I hope they took into account that blind users usually also don't upload avatars.

27182818284• 9 years ago

It isn't just about blocking those that haven't uploaded avatars. Egg users stick out because they have other properties such as

New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers

New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows

New account that starts and then immediately follows just a single person ever.

All of those are suspicious

bussierem• 9 years ago

New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers
New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows

Both of these are also the behavior of people who use Twitter simply as a content stream. They pretty accurately describe how I use Twitter.

raverbashing• 9 years ago

Some do upload

james_pm• 9 years ago

Next they'll want proof that the person in the avatar is actually you.

vorotato• 9 years ago

my avatar is a potato, so that would be difficult. Do I just show a potato?

notadoc2• 9 years ago

Maybe you'll have to show Twitter your state ID with the official potato picture identifying you as a potato.

rayvd• 9 years ago

Depends. Are you a potato?

arprocter• 9 years ago

Interested to see how penalizing accounts for 'repeatedly tweeting at non-followers' is going to work when most of what I see on the platform is people messaging celebs who don't follow them back

65827• 9 years ago

This is what I was going to post, seems to be about 90% of the activity on twitter. They seem to only care about the experience from the perspective of the haves, anyone else just isn't part of the conversation.

jsonne• 9 years ago

I think this is a good example of how optimizing for the power user, at a large scale, can actually be detrimental.

ceejayoz6• 9 years ago

Nothing's going to change for these users, though. Their shouting at random celebs will go unseen, as it always has.

Mendenhall• 9 years ago

Yea thats pretty much all twitter is. I think of all the people tweeting politicians etc.

ceejayoz6• 9 years ago

I've got a good stable of local folks with interests that match mine. Plenty of interesting conversations to be had - who you follow is up to you.

nikdaheratik7• 9 years ago

There are enough people talking to each other to make it interesting, at least for me. But the issue that most people are having is political nuts who just go around doing a search for "Donald Trump" or whoever and then abusing anyone who said anything remotely critical. Even worse are the actual white supremacists who do that or worse.

The bots are a problem as well, but they aren't what runs people off the platform.

FussyZeus2• 9 years ago

I'd imagine there's another element to it, probably ratio of that versus what they'd define as "regular use."

WillyOnWheels• 9 years ago

If you tweet 100s of times the same text at accounts that don't follow you, you're a bot.

usrusr• 9 years ago

Except when Twitter makes that a heuristic for detecting bots, then they'll soon stop tweeting the same text twice.

intoverflow25• 9 years ago

Will "Congrats on your 250 like tweet!" count under this?

chc• 9 years ago

That sounds like an informal description of a heuristic to flag accounts as potentially abusive rather than a specific rule with a specific punishment.

jsemrau3• 9 years ago

That got me banned a couple of weeks ago. I wrote an application that recommended an event to the user once he\she would tweet "I am bored". I made the mistake by giving providing a fall back once the location could not be determined. This lead to ~40 tweets with identical texts. Twitter quickly pulled out the banhammer.

Not to spam, but here is a write-up if there is an interest in what and how it happened: https://hackernoon.com/how-i-got-myself-banned-on-twitter-43...

feelix• 9 years ago

Any chance of sharing/providing the source code of the listener bot that auto responds?

pmiller2• 9 years ago

So much for the strategy of tweeting at a company to resolve consumer disputes. Normally, I would say that's a good thing, but sometimes these companies just don't respond to non-public channels. Google, for instance, is notorious for making it difficult to reach an actual human in customer service.

donatj• 9 years ago

The keyword filtering strikes me as the most filter bubble inducing thing I've heard in a while.

nmgsd• 9 years ago

A cool way to circumvent the keyword filtering: www.seecret.io

birdman3131• 9 years ago

So because I see no reason to upload a photo my 7 year old twitter account is now considered second rate whereas the bot account created last week is not because it was updated to upload a random profile image.

Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.

tomjen34• 9 years ago

I hope they are smarter than that. Don't forget the Gell-Man effect amnesia effect.

tomjen34• 9 years ago

Dammit. I thought I could now remove any tweet that had the word 'trump' in it[^2], which meant I could refollow a bunch of people and make twitter much more useful, but it seems that it only works for notifications in which you are mentioned[1], which means the feature is pretty pointless, at least for most people.

[1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 [^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don't want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.

ceejayoz6• 9 years ago

A lot of third-party clients implement this properly. Tweetbot's my favorite.

kobayashi• 9 years ago

No mention of how filtering might apply to Twitter's trending algorithms. Since much of the activities of bots are aimed at pushing a narrative to a wider audience (getting it trending), it seems like Twitter is currently neglecting one of the most serious harms that bots pose to the community.

I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use/account abuse.

rconti• 9 years ago

Pretty sure my only use case for Twitter is to tweet at non-followers, eg "get customer service".

notadoc2• 9 years ago

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template.

Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?

deeth_starr• 9 years ago

I'd like to see country of origin for tweets/accounts. I know this can be worked around with a vpn, but it's a start.

tokenizerrr• 9 years ago

That would be wherever the cheapest servers can be bought. Or just random open proxies.

nkrisc• 9 years ago

Surely they can recognize the downsides of a bubble of inflated engagement metrics waiting to burst? Willful ignorance?

Grollicus• 9 years ago

"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up)

I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..

teej• 9 years ago

Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.

Balgair2• 9 years ago

You know, I could see ol' Zuck sitting there in his Herman-Miller Aeron chair looking at the internal numbers of FB 'users' and seeing the number be ~15 billion accounts that their in-house 'bot filters still think are 'real' people. He says to himself: 'You know, maybe I could tell the UN that there really are 15 billion people out there and they are all on FB. Ha, I mean, a lot of people really might believe me.' He looks out the window, sighs, and puts out an email via Thunderbird to the marketing team leads that says to keep the number at 2 billion.

anigbrowl2• 9 years ago

What tools do people use to administer these? Since Twitter and other platforms seem to have no interest in fixing the problem I figure I might as well stop trying to abide by their ToS and leverage the technology for my own agenda.

kordless• 9 years ago

What needs to happen is that they open up all the blocked account information for all users, and show when users that are blocked by X many users have deleted tweets.

The problem defined is that Twitter allows viral communication to occur in Humans, but which is being exploited in a very specific way by a small group of people who understand how to spread dissonant ideas by intentionally using polarized, meme-based arguments, which themselves are viral in nature. It's like a logic "jingle" you get stuck in your head. Or a virus.

It's on Twitter to fix the Pandora's Box they have opened with this type of infrastructure. (And I'm still sticking to my claim that Twitter is infrastructure given how much it can govern our behavior.)

taytus2• 9 years ago

"Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product", this is easy to answer. Investors. Investors who don't care about nothing but vanity metrics, investors who don't make CEOs accountable. This is why, twitter is not the exception.

jaredhansen• 9 years ago

Sorry, but this explanation makes no sense. $TWTR has been a public company since 2013, with investors who emphatically do care about things other than vanity metrics.

A list of the largest Twitter shareholders[1] includes Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley etc. These folks really don't care about "engagement metrics", except as proxies for revenue.

This argument can hold for earlier-stage companies with investors hoping to sell at inflated valuations to a greater fool later in line, but once you've been publicly held for several years, it's quite a stretch. Whatever's hurting Twitter's ability to fix its problems, it isn't "investor pressure".

[1] http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-majo...

ghettoCoder• 9 years ago

Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter's demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted.

I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there...

Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.

monksy• 9 years ago

What I don't understand: Why doesn't twitter take moderation seriously? On reddit it's left up to the moderators of each sub. It does very. But having a very "up to interpretation" but yet not politically biased set of rules and enforcement is great.

We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.

pjc502• 9 years ago

I'd love them to take moderation seriously, but it couldn't scale and there's no natural "partitions" between communities of interest with different norms, so you can't delegate it to users. They've only just managed to deal with the most high profile example of "brigading".

snissn2• 9 years ago

Just got this today:

Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.

cdelsolar• 9 years ago

I mean maybe she just found you really appealing.

snissn2• 9 years ago

Aw shucks, you think? Thanks :)

Sacho2• 9 years ago

That's a lot of tweets(5+). Did you get them all at the same time, or did they have some kind of randomized delay? Also uh...what's the benefit of spamming you out of Twitter and into Snapchat? Do people get $$ for views of their snapchat images, or something?

lutusp• 9 years ago

Translation: "Wired takes aim at people running ad blockers."

rafaelm• 9 years ago

I see Twitter is getting harder and harder to use anonymously. As someone living under a totalitarian government that is tightening its grip everyday on free speech and the internet in general, this worries me.

Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible.

I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.

Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

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