[HN Gopher] Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be f...
___________________________________________________________________
Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or spam
Author : iamflimflam1
Score : 459 points
Date : 2022-05-16 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sparktoro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sparktoro.com)
| nrmitchi wrote:
| The biggest issue with any "study" like this is the definitions.
| What is a "bot"? What counts as "inactive"?
|
| What about "bots" that aren't "bad bots"? For example, a news
| organization twitter account that automatically tweets out new
| articles. This is clearly a "bot", but is it a "fake account"?
|
| Yes, most studies published specify what their own interpretation
| of these are, those definitions tend to be wildly inconsistent,
| and make any sort of comparison of the rest of the methodology
| impossible.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Well I have literally never posted from twitter in my 5 years or
| so of having an account, but I'm on there almost everyday and use
| it as my news feed for topics I want to read about and blogs I
| follow. However according to them I'm fake/spam. hrrmph.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Bots contribute easily a third of the value of the Twitter
| service, they aren't "fake". This is a terrible analysis.
| j4pe wrote:
| Parag apparently lost his patience with superficial and
| misleading claims about Twitter spam (like this analysis) and
| posted about it today.
|
| You can see it here
| (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576).
|
| Noteworthy highlights:
|
| * Twitter estimates its <5% number from human analysis of multi-
| thousand user random samplings of mDAU
|
| * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid
| introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences
|
| * Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis
|
| * Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot
| without this internal private data
|
| Having just finished building a Twitter analysis tool, I agree
| with Parag that the Twitter API doesn't provide sufficient
| clarity to make decisions about spam. This article's analysis
| doesn't hold up - just because you can name several features
| you're going to use to generate a spam confidence score about an
| account does not mean that spam confidence score will have any
| precision.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| >Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot
| without this internal private data
|
| Riiiight, and Craig Wright claims to have proof of being
| Satoshi Nakamoto but won't show anybody.
|
| I don't know how good of a CEO Parag is, but he's not a very
| good bullshitter.
| ramblerman wrote:
| But we were talking about bots. You and Parag are shifting the
| dialogue to spam
|
| > The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake
| superficially - are actually real people. And some of the spam
| accounts which are actually the most dangerous - and cause the
| most harm to our users - can look totally legitimate on the
| surface.
|
| He's not talking about detecting bots. I.e. fake and automated
| accounts. He's talking about twitter users/bots that cause what
| they perceive to be harmful content. Which is a very different
| thing, and was the whole point of Musk's intended involvement
| in the first place.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I think Elon's response reflects what a lot of us are thinking
| about the "<5%" number.
| dang wrote:
| Related thread:
|
| _Twitter CEO: "Let's talk about spam, with the benefit of
| data, facts, context"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31399913 - May 2022 (13
| comments)
| seydor wrote:
| It makes sense. The bots are just loud and tend to all follow
| the most famous people, so their numbers look larger when
| people look there
| christkv wrote:
| If they believe the claim to be false they can open the data
| they used to calculate the 5% so it can be verified by a third
| party.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Absolutely not. No social media company should take a set of
| user's private data and "open the data" (especially just
| because some blowhard is trying to find any reason to back
| out of a deal). Even without the "open" bit, they shouldn't
| be providing that data to a third party.
| berkut wrote:
| So you want them to publicly list / make download-able any
| phone numbers of the people in that 5%, and their full names
| and email addresses?
| alaricus wrote:
| > Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not
| bot without this internal private data
|
| That's convenient isn't it?
|
| This report made headlines because it aligns with everyone's
| experience with Twitter: almost everyone on Twitter is either a
| bot or a corporate managed account.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > * Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid
| introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences
|
| This doesn't pass the smell test in my opinion. Given that
| everyone who tries to create an account without a phone number
| has to go through the friction of getting their account locked
| immediately, they clearly don't care about this sort of
| friction. Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a
| tweet which has been discussed at length on HN before.
| throwmeawayy wrote:
| I have a Twitter account with > 10k followers that is a few
| years old. Created without a phone number, and of course,
| immediately locked. Somehow, managed get it unlocked and
| still going on a few years later without a phone number.
| Though, I'm always in fear of the ban hammer.
| thecleaner wrote:
| The difference is between posting a tweet everytime and going
| through the friction once. That's what he's talking about.
| You are comparing different things.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Given that everyone who tries to create an account without
| a phone number has to go through the friction
|
| Yes
|
| > Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a tweet
| which has been discussed at length on HN before.
|
| Yes
|
| Now imagine filling out 3 captchas every time you open the
| twitter app on your phone, 1 for ever time you tweet and 1
| for every person you follow.
|
| Most users of twitter, use either an app on their phone or
| the cookies in their browser suffer the friction of
| forgetting their password (likely password1 btw) because they
| have to log in so infrequently.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Musk responded to Parag's thread with a poop emoji. Not going
| to lie if I worked at twitter I would be a little nervous about
| my career at this point. For several reasons including what
| appears to be the potential for a very hostile work culture in
| the near term. Musk is being openly antagonistic towards
| twitter leadership and denigrating the people that work there.
| Although it does seem more and more like the deal is not going
| to close. I don't think Musk wants it anymore and is seizing on
| anything to get out of it.
| diob wrote:
| I don't think he wanted it in the first place. This is all
| performative bs for him to make another quick buck / get pr.
| plausibledeny wrote:
| How is Elon going to make a quick buck from a failed deal?
| If anything he'll have to pay out significantly.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| The PR is priceless.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Musk has a history of making public, bad-faith
| declarations to pump assets he later sells at profit.
|
| More than one person has pointed out that Musk likely
| wanted to sell his Twitter stock, and was using the
| official-looking, low-ball buy offer to pump it. Twitter
| board smartly called his bluff, and now Musk is trying to
| weasel his way out of paying anything.
| gzer0 wrote:
| > Musk has a history of making public, bad-faith
| declarations to pump assets he later sells at profit.
|
| Could you point me to those instances?
|
| His offer wasn't a lowball offer at all considering the
| tech stock bloodbath we have seen as of late, and
| especially so because the offer was made just right
| before the massive downturn we have witnessed. I think
| it's quite the contrary; 44 billion is way higher than
| its worth imo.
|
| > Musk is trying to weasel his way out of paying
| anything.
|
| He would need to pay a $1 billion break up fee. I don't
| understand what point you are trying to make here.
| blitzar wrote:
| > His offer wasn't a lowball offer at all considering the
| tech stock bloodbath we have seen as of late
|
| The real bloodbath came after he bought it, at the time
| it was a modest premium.
|
| > He would need to pay a $1 billion break up fee.
|
| He is laying out the case at the moment to walk away and
| pay no break up fee.
| panspermia wrote:
| Just look at some of the MAGA crowd embracing Tesla and
| electric cars where three months ago they entirely
| dismissive of Musk.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Can't wait for the $2,000 "Texas TruckNutz" option for
| the Tesla Cybertruck. Retractable, obviously - for better
| aerodynamics.
| pavlov wrote:
| He got an excuse to sell lots of Tesla stock at a price
| 40% higher than today. Selling the stock without this
| charade would have sent a negative message about how
| little he believes in Tesla's stock price and sunk the
| price further.
|
| Even accounting for the breakup fee he comes ahead
| financially by many billions in cash, while also building
| his image as the free speech edgelord. Win-win.
| [deleted]
| plausibledeny wrote:
| He just sold $16 billion worth of Tesla stock in Nov/Dec
| 2021, why would he need a fake excuse to sell another $8
| billion in April 2022?
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Your logic is terrible. Your argument would only make
| sense if he didn't have an excuse for the previous sale,
| but he did.
| camjw wrote:
| I remember reading on here that the breakup fee is only
| applicable in very narrow cases, basically only if the US
| govt blocks the deal. If it's not applicable then he's on
| the hook for the whole ~40billy. Does he still come out
| ahead financially in that case if, for instance, the
| Twitter board take him to court? Genuine question.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Read Matt Levine's Money Stuff column from the past
| couple days -- it explains realistically what could
| happen.
| pavlov wrote:
| Would they really go to court? That could take years and
| create a cloud of uncertainty around Twitter -- certainly
| not good for shareholder value.
|
| It's much easier for the board if they settle privately
| with Musk: "Yeah, pay the breakup fee and we'll forget
| this ever happened."
| sangnoir wrote:
| I read someone else's analysis of the agreement: it
| bizarrely sets the cap for any damages that can be sued
| in court to $1B - same as the breakup fee. This obviously
| gives Elon an incentive to not pay breakup fee, but go to
| court first instead. At worst, he'd pay a billion, and
| best, whatever the court says thats less than a billion +
| legal fees
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| > Musk is being openly antagonistic towards twitter
| leadership and denigrating the people that work there.
|
| Seeing how badly twitter has been managed, (for a laugh,
| check out their "R&D" expenditure), how mush of a loss making
| enterprise it has been, and how it always at risk of a take
| over, is it that surprising?
|
| If it has been Elliot Management (the previous rumored
| takeover threat for twitter) a group far less prone to public
| display than Musk... would things have been any less
| different? The only difference is that Musk is being open
| about what he has been doing, which I see a public good,
| frankly.
|
| Elliot's track record shows it is far more vicious in layoffs
| of cuts.
|
| ----
|
| https://fortune.com/2013/10/25/why-is-twitter-spending-so-
| mu...
|
| https://www.rndtoday.co.uk/latest-news/is-twitters-rd-
| provid...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2021/11/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-
| departu...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevindowd/2022/02/27/wall-
| stree...
| modeless wrote:
| "But you don't know which ones we count as mDAUs" and "accounts
| that look like spam are actually real" are not as good a
| defense as he thinks. The product is still affected by spam and
| fraud even if it's excluded from advertising metrics, and
| accounts that look like spam are not good for the product
| either even if they happen to be real people for whatever
| reason.
| LNSY wrote:
| This estimate seems very low
| tiffanyh wrote:
| How does Elon benefit by _NOT_ acquiring Twitter?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I am guessing that it makes sense that very high profile people
| will have a higher percentage of fake followers than an ordinary,
| small account would because many of these fake accounts are bots
| that are set up in order to get attention for whatever they're
| selling or promoting by interacting with high profile accounts.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, there are different bots for different purposes.
|
| A bot operated to post advert messages might want to post them
| on high profile accounts.
|
| A bot for a "500 followers for $5" company might be more likely
| to follow low-profile accounts, with some random
| activity/follows thrown in as camouflage.
|
| A bot operated to amplify certain messages/opinions might
| follow accounts of middling visibility, and focus on likes
| rather than more visible activity.
| _joel wrote:
| I thought it'd be higher than that tbf
| coldcode wrote:
| I check everyone I follow (mostly artists) to see if they are
| posting art generally, and look at most of the people who follow
| me to see what they do before following them back. There are a
| few (legit) retweeting bots and I have ignored a bunch of people
| because they did not seem real. I remember a set of accounts
| followed me that had (1) no tweets (2) avatar pic of MCU movie
| actor and (3) hundreds of followers.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Why are we always "surprised" by this?
| mgas wrote:
| You only need to see who the author of this post is to know that
| the methodology is crap, the numbers are likely made up (19.42%
| is WAY too specific), and the post is just a grab for media
| attention on the coattails of some other internet meme garbage.
|
| This guy (Rand Fishkin) has been selling SEO as a religion for
| the better part of this century, and is in no small part
| responsible for all the search-result-garbage style websites
| everyone is complaining about elsewhere on HN today and every
| other day.
|
| He's a third-rate market-bro hack that's been taking advantage of
| web professionals who get thrown into SEO/Marketing jobs and have
| no idea what they're doing by relentlessly shoving half-assed
| corporate strategies through moz.com and now his new
| sparktoro.com, and calling himself the great SEO redeemer.
|
| Wanna question his methodology? There is none. Wanna question his
| science? Totally devoid.
| seydor wrote:
| well if his science is SEO he seems to be good at it
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Unfortunately, this sort of thing is absolutely standard when
| third parties discuss Twitter spam. There is an astounding
| amount of academic research doing the same thing with
| methodologies just as silly.
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
| miguelazo wrote:
| Who is this actually a surprise to??? And how is it unique to
| Twitter? _Yawn_ This whole Musk "deal" was just another way for
| him to get attention and attack the company. Sad that our media
| ecosystem is so thoroughly debased that it worked so well.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "By contrast, most "spam" accounts are an unwanted nuisance.
| Their activities range from peddling propaganda and
| disinformation to those attempting to sell products, induce
| website clicks, push phishing attempts or malware, manipulate
| stocks or cryptocurrencies, and (perhaps worst) harass or
| intimidate users of the platform."
|
| My perception of Twitter is that some of the worst behavior on
| Twitter is coming from the 'well-respected authentic accounts of
| government and media personalities', particularly when it comes
| to disinformation, marketing, and indeed, intimidation of those
| with non-conformant opinions on various topics, such as, for
| example, the wisdom of unconditionally flooding Ukraine with
| high-tech ordnance in the name of repelling the Russian invasion
| (or is that really more about delivering a cash cow to US weapons
| manufacturers)? That's the kind of thing that could lead to
| doxing by corporate media reporters and charges of being 'a
| Russian asset' even if such concerns are reasonable.
|
| Also, how many of the 'registered authentic accounts' include
| tweets not written by the actual personality they claim to
| represent, but rather by some kind of in-house PR/image
| management consultants? Just because there's a paid human
| somewhere in the chain doesn't mean the account is all that
| 'authentic'.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Go through this comment section, you won't believe it
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/McDonalds/status/1521143128073424...
| rvz wrote:
| Not surprising.
|
| On the flip-side, you do realise this is a way to justify
| complete verification of users on the platform to significantly
| reduce the bots, fake accounts, etc? I won't be surprised to see
| that implemented soon.
|
| Probably by the end of this month, things are going to get very
| chaotic at Twitter.
|
| We'll see what happens.
| mk89 wrote:
| The question would be ... how much will Elon Musk pay to buy
| Twitter after pointing out that their business is essentially a
| bunch of bots, etc.?
|
| Kind of "hey guys, look, I really think your platform costs
| around 52$ per share, but ... let's try to see the actual price.
| How many bots do you have again? :)" Whenever this guy speaks, a
| whole freaking market moves.
|
| It's like "cleaning up the mess" even before joining the company
| as their CEO. In the worst case scenario, he dodged a huge
| bullet. So, who cares.
| natch wrote:
| That .42 has got to be a small wink at Elon... if not from the
| team that did this, then from the simulation.
| timcavel wrote:
| steve76 wrote:
| blenderdt wrote:
| The real question is: does it matter?
| gone35 wrote:
| "70.23% of @ElonMusk followers are unlikely to be authentic,
| active users who see his tweets."
|
| Somewhat alarming, if accurate.
| ramblerman wrote:
| They define active as having tweeted in the last 90 days.
|
| I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow
| @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or
| their assumptions are a bit off.
|
| Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article):
|
| 1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently
|
| 2) Accounts with low number of tweets
|
| 3) Accounts with a low number of followers
|
| 4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image
|
| Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for
| lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially
| given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority
| of twitter users don't tweet very much.
|
| 25% of Twitter Users Produce 97% of All Tweets:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
| _joel wrote:
| Same here I never tweet but follow a few people.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I am the same, in fact my account has never posted a thing
| ever, never liked at thing ever, I just follow people I want
| to see updates from that is all.
|
| I treat it like RSS not Social Media
| phpisatrash wrote:
| Look my username
| jacquesm wrote:
| With Twitters' changes to ask people to log in to see most
| content the number of lurkers probably shot up.
| loceng wrote:
| I'm now wondering what % of overall tweets are from that
| 1/5th of bots.
|
| If it's 1-1 then 20% of tweets being from bots isn't great -
| but it could even be more than that.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The ratio of fake Elon Musk accounts to real Elon Musk accounts
| is probably even funnier.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Sounds accurate if you go through the comments under his
| tweets, a ton of url spam and scam 'trader' bots
| Inu wrote:
| I think it's connected to a more general phenomenon though.
| Pewdiepie has 111 million subscribers on YT and gets like 3-5
| million views per video. Like 95% of his subscribers don't
| watch his videos.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I've subscribed to a bunch of people on Youtube whos videos I
| no longer watch.
|
| I think Youtube's UI "encourages" this behaviour even more as
| it has a highly algorithmic homepage rather than a feed of
| people you follow.
| newobj wrote:
| Remember when Twitter first started, people thought Twitter
| usernames were going to be like domain names (except free)? LOL.
| I must have 50 Twitter accounts personally. Any time I had an
| idea, I used to grab a Twitter account for it.
|
| Anyway I think it's pretty goofy to try to make claims around %s
| of Twitter accounts, active or otherwise, only absolute numbers
| make sense. What really matters at this point besides revenue and
| revenue trend?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Honestly I would guess higher than 20%
| riffic wrote:
| Fake is kind of a weird way to describe valid combinations of
| usernames and passwords that can log into Twitter.com. I would
| assume that if your account hasn't been disabled for whatever
| reason, it's a _real_ Twitter account.
|
| Twitter, however, does call these accounts "fake" and has further
| rules/policies concerning _Misleading & Deceptive Identities_.
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-imper...
| politician wrote:
| If you were opposed to Twitter being sold to Elon Musk, then it
| seems like you would have a great incentive to create as many
| spam or fake accounts as possible over the next 30 days or so to
| shift the numbers in favor of him abandoning his takeover bid.
| Traster wrote:
| So to get this straight - SparkToro have decided to burn their
| reputation down chasing a spurious irrelevant claim from someone
| else's merger. It'll never cease to amaze me how many people will
| take obvious trolling and treat is as reasonable. This is like
| conducting a serious analysis into whether the US election was
| stolen.
|
| I hope they like law suits:
|
| > Our analysis found that 19.42%, nearly four times Twitter's Q4
| 2021 estimate, fit a conservative definition of fake or spam
| accounts
|
| Ok great, I hope you have fun proving that in court. Especially
| the part where you have to prove that Twitter's definitions which
| _you don 't know_ match yours.
|
| >SparkToro is a tiny team of just three
|
| Then I applaud your bold decision to interfere with a $45Bn
| merger.
|
| >Our definition (which may differ from Twitter's own
|
| Any lawyers in the house? How obviously do you have to renege on
| your libelous claims before you're in the clear?
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I signed up with a vpn and got banned for life after a single
| nonsense tweet about not liking the feed and following 4-5 famous
| people. I don't think bot detection techniques are very robust
|
| > This methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but
| almost never includes false positives (i.e. claiming an account
| is fake when it isn't).
|
| In other words, their model performs well on their training set,
| and they don't acknowledge that it may be over fitted or
| mislabeled, and they hand wave mistakes
| fivre wrote:
| they're robust at generating false positives! i got insta-
| locked for, i think, signing up using my own email domain, to
| make an account that shares pictures i took of geese. it took
| about 4 months to wait for them to unlock it
|
| meanwhile, saudi bot armies apparently basically run rampant
| across the platform
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| I'm 6 months into my account and they still haven't asked for a
| phone number. I mean, I have one ready if they ask for it.
| Maybe I've been whitelisted as a non-bad-faith actor due to my
| timezone and other factors.
| joering2 wrote:
| Its get even worse than that. I have a test account with about
| 10,000 followers (mostly real people, you can tell), created
| via home-used IP, and few days after Musk tweet comparing Gates
| to Emoji of pregnant man, I did exact same tweet! With exact
| same punctuation, images, icons, everything.
|
| Less than 2 days later I am banned for "spewing hatred based on
| sex, gender or religion". No amount of replies that my tweet
| was same as another but much much more popular account helped.
| Banned for life.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Elon already knew this of course. Buying Twitter was just an
| excuse to sell Tesla stock at a peak while avoiding suspicion.
| Now he's teeing up his excuse to pull out. /conspiracy
| Fargoan wrote:
| This is what I was thinking too. People would panic if he sold
| that much stock. But if he's just taking out a loan to buy
| another company it's no big deal.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| /shrug Pump and dump is Elon's raison d'etre. Idk why people
| keep falling for his bs.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Elon pledges Tesla stock as collateral, Tesla stock goes
| down. Announces deal 'on hold', Tesla stock goes up. Unless
| he can get the price of Twitter down to where he does not
| have to use Tesla as collateral, its just a bad purchase
| decision.
| avs733 wrote:
| because he is rich - therefore smarter than everyone else.
| MrMan wrote:
| Occams razor is not a conspiracy
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Billionaires making bold plays while backed by a cadre of top
| lawyers and accountants the kind of "conspiracy" that is
| totally expected.
| lapcat wrote:
| I don't think this is the simplest explanation. The simplest
| explanation is this: Musk's primary source of financing is
| Tesla stock. The sudden market downturn took a big chunk out
| of Tesla stock, which made his financial situation more
| difficult.
|
| The delay in closing the deal is just that, a delay, in the
| hope that the market will recover and the price of Tesla
| stock will recover, thereby making Musk's financing position
| much easier.
|
| Nobody anticipated the downturn, otherwise Musk never would
| have made a $54 per share offer for Twitter in the first
| place, because obviously it's much lower now, as is much of
| the tech market.
|
| It's hard to believe that making a binding $54 offer on a
| stock that's only $39 a month later was "4D chess". I do
| think $54 was a reasonable, maybe even lowball offer a month
| ago. Twitter itself hasn't changed much in a month
| operationally speaking, but the whole market changed in
| valuation.
| MrMan wrote:
| I just find it hard to believe Musk really wants to own and
| run twitter, he seems to actively hate it and is trying to
| tank its value.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| Or he actually wants to own Twitter and drives up its value by
| making Twitter known to every person on the internet. Bad news
| are good news.
|
| It doesn't matter if 5% or 20% or even 40% of Twitter users are
| bots. If Musk manages to double the number of subscribers by
| making Twitter a household name then the purchase was a good
| investment.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| Or negotiate a better price?
| efsavage wrote:
| 64.56432% of significant digits are misused.
| ralusek wrote:
| Your mental random number generator, or the keys you're willing
| to type one handedly for a bit, represent only 50% of the 10
| Arabic numerals in use today.
| yboris wrote:
| With only 7 digits typed, we would expect at least some
| repetition ;)
|
| The chance of _no_ digit repeating out of 7 would be about
| 20%
| dylan604 wrote:
| With a proper keyboard including a 10-key, I can reach all 10
| of those Arabic numerals with one hand. I find your logic
| equally as flawed as the statistic. You sir, must be a
| spambot account!
| mherdeg wrote:
| Interesting to think about:
|
| > Our systems do not, however, attempt to identify Twitter
| accounts that may be irregularly operated by a human but have
| some automated behaviors (e.g. a company account with multiple
| users, like our own @SparkToro, or a community account run by a
| single person, like Aleyda Solis' @CrawlingMondays). We cannot
| know how Twitter (or Mr. Musk) might choose to classify these
| accounts, but we bias to a relatively conservative interpretation
| of "Spam/Fake."
|
| So this means:
|
| * @EmojiAquarium - spam/fake * @threateningcake - not spam/fake *
| @CanYouPetTheDog - spam/fake * @ChuckGrassley - not spam/fake (??
| - what fraction are staff generated vs Chuck?) * @Wendys -
| spam/fake * @Twitter - spam/fake
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| "I used to not be into bitcoin, until I met the right trader!"
| ...
| Jyaif wrote:
| Assuming that's true, would that mean that Elon has a way out
| that does not involve paying 1B$ ?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SfXoCj4TLk
| TL;DR is that it may or may not be enough to justify it in
| court if Twitter sues, but it probably is enough to make a
| court case necessary, and Twitter's board may be reluctant to
| spend years in court trying to win their case, since inevitably
| the court case would involve the very public airing of facts
| like this that would not paint Twitter in a good light.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And would block any possible future deal, with Elon or
| anybody else until that court case was resolved.
| lapcat wrote:
| Twitter wasn't looking to sell itself. This was an
| unsolicited takeover bid.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's true, and the Twitter shareholders should have
| realized who they are dealing with. But that does not
| mean that tying themselves up a court case for several
| years is smart because it appears that in fact they are
| willing to sell.
| lapcat wrote:
| Well, the threat was there to bypass the board of
| directors, controlled by big long-term investors, and go
| directly to the shareholders, many of whom would be happy
| to cash out for short-term gain. So the board was under
| major pressure to agree, even if they were somewhat
| reluctant.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| Aside: Patrick Boyle's humor is always spot on. Love that
| channel.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Absolutely agreed.
| MrMan wrote:
| No
| matdehaast wrote:
| AFAIK he doesn't even have a way out of paying the full buying
| price. The breakup fee does not allow him to abritarly invoke
| it. It is only conditional on finance, of which the banks have
| already given binding commitments. Matt Levine has a great
| article on it [1].
|
| [1] -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
| LargeWu wrote:
| I think it's instructive to note the difference between 'fake'
| accounts and 'spam'/'bot' accounts.
|
| 'Fake' accounts exist to fraudulently increase follower count.
| This is what the study is claiming to measure. These typically
| have low activity and engagement profiles.
|
| 'Spam' or 'bot' accounts, on the other hand, generally have high
| activity. Whether trying to influence political opinions, or
| engaging in astroturfing or phishing activities. They probably
| have very, very high ratios of replies to original tweets, and
| overall tweets to # followers.
| MrMan wrote:
| Musk should have hired these people before he waived due
| diligence
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm loathe to invoke "4D Chess" but I can't help but think this
| may have been a tactical decision to either lower the price of
| Twitter before the purchase, or to impugn its reputation
| without actually buying the company.
| rglover wrote:
| My speculation: it was to make sure the data was pure when he
| uses it to train the Tesla Bot AI.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| To lower the price that he set after choosing to not run his
| due diligence? It's possible, sure, but not likely.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Could be a tool for renegotiation, but then again I know
| very little about these kind of high stakes corporate
| acquisitions.
| redmen wrote:
| 20%? That's it?
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| Note that these researchers define an "active" user as one who
| has posted a Tweet in the last two months. This is a very
| different definition than the standard "MAU" definition of
| "active" which means having used the site at all in the last
| period.
|
| One definition isn't better than the other but it is worth noting
| that opening Twitter, looking at a lot of Tweets, seeing a lot of
| ads, and not posting any Tweets is a behavioral pattern much more
| commonly seen in humans than in spambots.
| westcort wrote:
| It sounds like Twitter could easily shed hundreds of millions of
| fake followers by banning Elon Musk any account that follows Elon
| Musk!
| sschueller wrote:
| What kind of idiot would attempt a purchase of such magnitude
| before doing his due diligence (obviously, no one, it's an excuse
| after the price collapsed)? For fs some people probe fruit for a
| minute until they decide it's worthy a purchase.
|
| How many more of these types of "events" until people stop
| treating Elon like some super genius god? Stop giving/loaning him
| money enabling this garbage.
| fundad wrote:
| Don't talk about Twitter's newest co-founder like that.
| FargaColora wrote:
| Did you read the article, or even these comments on the
| article? Nothing supports what you say at all. Of course it's
| easier just to shout about the billionaire man.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Did you read the HN guidelines? If not then I would invite
| you to do so:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Which guideline is the OP's comment breaking?
| kazinator wrote:
| This one: _Please don 't comment on whether someone read
| an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions
| that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."_
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Spot on!
| deelowe wrote:
| This seems intentional to me. Musk has been claiming there's a
| bot/troll problem on social media for quite some time. I think
| he knew this going in.
| michaelt wrote:
| I read a hypothesis, a few weeks back, that Elon doesn't want
| to buy Twitter, but rather wants to mess with the price to
| thumb his nose at the SEC.
|
| Perhaps all this uncertainty is intentional.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You don't to look under the covers until your offer is
| accepted.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| not a surprise at all.
| mattzito wrote:
| This study is a great example of how you can use the data you
| have available to talk yourself into your conclusions. The
| implicit point of the study is to refute the "5% of Twitter
| accounts are spam" stat from Twitter's 10-Q that was the basis of
| his putting the twitter acquisition "on hold".
|
| Except - the baseline that they choose is entirely NOT comparable
| to that of Twitter's baseline. The study says:
|
| > Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts
| that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90
| days, a clear indication of "activity." Further, Followerwonk
| regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove
| any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both
| large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated
| to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a
| monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
|
| Except that we know what Twitter defines as a monetizable DAU:
|
| > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as
| Twitter users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day
| through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show
| ads.
|
| Nothing about posting, nothing about engagement at all - simply:
| were you able to see an ad?
|
| So there isn't any reason to claim that this "might" represent
| what Twitter uses as an mDAU - we know, in fact, that is not how
| they measure it. A more honest statement would have been:
|
| "We selected a random sample of (etc. etc.). We believe that this
| sample is large enough to be significantly significant, however,
| it can not be compared to Twitter's mDAU set, as it does not
| count passive consumers of Twitter content. Instead, this data
| can be used to suggest that a significant amount of the total
| posted content on Twitter is delivered by bots"
|
| My guess is the number of consumers of content is greater than
| the posters of content by several orders of magnitude, though
| some of that would be mitigated by the longer time horizon.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The whole thing is BS. Twitter could have easily got an
| accurate number if they wanted to. And Elon could have forced
| them to do that as part of the deal or done a decent job on his
| own before the offer.
|
| Both sides are bullshitting to negotiate a better price.
| mattzito wrote:
| The only one bullshitting is Elon Musk - that 5% number has
| been in Twitter's 10-Q for literally years. Here's the 10-Q
| from Q3 2020:
|
| https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/cb1d93d.
| ..
|
| "We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts
| and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts
| during the third quarter of 2020 represented fewer than 5% of
| our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a
| period represents the average of false or spam accounts in
| the samples during each monthly analysis period during the
| quarter"
|
| This is not a new stat or new information.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I already said Elon was bullshitting.
|
| Are you saying Twitter isn't bullshitting? You think that
| Twitter put in their best effort to get an accurate number?
| mattzito wrote:
| You said:
|
| "both sides are bullshitting to get a better price"
|
| Which implies that this number is related to Twitter
| trying to get a better price. However, if this is the
| number they have always said, regardless of the
| methodology, clearly they can't be trying to get a better
| price - as they started doing this long before there was
| a price to make better.
|
| That is separate and independent from whether the number
| is accurate to begin with - if it's remained consistent
| and publicly available, there's no chicanery here, the
| risk around that stat has always been baked into the
| market price of the company.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The percentage of fake users has a high correlation with
| the value of the business. Twitter's value is higher if
| the number is lower. I'm not suggesting they just started
| bullshitting in the past month, just that they are not
| making the best effort to get an accurate number.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Shouldn't they be saying the number is decreasing vs
| staying at ~5% for years then?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Having zero bots would be good, but obviously that isn't
| True. So instead they say a low consistent number and
| hope no one proves them wrong. Most importantly it
| doesn't appear to be getting worse.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think that Twitter actively does not want spambots on
| their site and therefore would invest into metrics so
| they know how they're performing on that.
| andreyk wrote:
| To be fair, they do admit this:
|
| "Are you challenging Twitter's earnings report, saying that <5%
| of mDAUs are fake/spam? We are not disputing
| Twitter's claim. There's no way to know what criteria Twitter
| uses to identify a "monetizable daily active user" (mDAU) nor
| how they classify "fake/spam" accounts. We believe our
| methodology (detailed above) to be the best system available to
| public researchers. But, internally, Twitter likely has
| unknowable processes that we cannot replicate with only their
| public data."
| mabbo wrote:
| To be clear: it doesn't matter, as far as Elon Musk and his
| buyout is concerned.
|
| To quote Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter:
|
| > "Temporarily on hold" is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a
| binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter.
|
| > That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out
| that "spam/fake accounts" represent more than 5% of Twitter
| users... The merger agreement contains a provision that allows
| Musk to walk away if Twitter's securities filings are wrong ...
| but only if the inaccuracy would have a "Material Adverse Effect"
| on the company. That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware
| courts have almost never found an MAE.
|
| > Musk ... had the opportunity to do due diligence on these
| numbers before signing the deal. (He declined.) He can't now go
| to Twitter and say "actually now you need to prove that your user
| numbers are right."
|
| [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m..
| .
| badwolf wrote:
| I think Musk declining due diligence is a pretty important
| point that needs to be repeated often the last few days...
| durnygbur wrote:
| So politicians and rich are announcing new laws and their stuff
| mostly to bots while a casual visitor sees a login wall. Nice.
| Throw it to a volcano with IG, FB and remaining American
| "internet" 1/8
| fattybob wrote:
| I am also an avid twitter reader, but seldom post, I would assume
| valid counts of users would recognize users who at least access
| and refresh their feeds
| tmaly wrote:
| That is a 0.03% sample size of the total 130+ million accounts.
|
| I was just explaining the law of small numbers to my daughter for
| her science fair. I think this would qualify.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Maybe someday she'll explain to you that errors in sample
| estimates depend only on sample size and not population size.
| tmaly wrote:
| I think the bigger error is still in drawing conclusions from
| a small sample size.
| smm11 wrote:
| I've had a Twitter account for 7 years, and have not once
| Tweeted.
| imchillyb wrote:
| This is /exactly/ why Mr. Musk has required the board to prove
| their math.
|
| The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares, is
| predicated upon human users on their system and not spam
| accounts.
|
| Twitter's valuation of its stock is way-overblown if there are
| 20% bot accounts on their platform.
|
| Go Elon!
| ironlake wrote:
| >The valuation the board has reached, for Twitter shares
|
| Absolutely! When the board demanded that Musk pay $54.20 per
| share - which is a completely rational number that they
| demanded from Musk and not a meme number that he made up
| himself - they underestimated his ability to do Math, and he's
| about to show them what's what.
|
| One of the core duties of a Board of Directors for a publicly
| traded company is to arrive at a valuation of the stock each
| morning before the markets open. It's a shame that this board
| is either incompetent or corrupt and came up with the number
| $54.20 based on bot accounts. Musk is having his people do a
| complete audit of 100 random followers of the @Twitter account
| to find the true number. I expect the terms of this deal to
| change significantly in Musk's favor.
|
| It's too bad that this distracts him from shipping the Cyber
| Truck, going to Mars, and then building a 1.6km tunnel under
| Las Vegas (a feat which has never before been achieved).
|
| Praying for a quick resolution so we can finally get some Free
| Speech on the Twitter platform.
| datalopers wrote:
| Holy revisionist history. The "valuation" is $54.20 per share
| because Elon is a child and thought he was being clever when he
| made that offer. Twitter simply accepted it.
|
| Is it way above fair market value (especially in the time
| between his offer and today)? Absolutely.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Elon hasn't required the board to do anything. He signed an
| agreement to purchase the company with no due diligence or
| backout clauses. If he tries to get out now he'll see Twitter
| in court.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| If they lied on SEC filings about this, he bought something
| not as advertised, so I'm not so sure...
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Have you even read the SEC filings cause if you had you
| probably wouldn't be parroting that?
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I thought the SEC filings both have a number and a risk
| of being wrong?
|
| Re:parroting, while that seems to have been a pejorative,
| I wasn't actually copying from anywhere, just a smb
| executive sensitive to this sort of thing during m&a as
| standard business discussions, so it's interesting that
| it's being repeated enough to accuse people here of
| 'parrot'ing!
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| There is no hard number. It mentions that they are just
| an estimate and could be off. They are labeled as MAUs,
| so that gives a lot of leniency depending on how "active"
| they are. It doesn't define bots either.
|
| The SEC filings thing has been repeated even by Musk
| himself. It doesn't really help him.
| [deleted]
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I talk to bots a lot and you know what? If they are of good
| faith, and say interesting things that nobody else says, let them
| be. So in past eras women were excluded from speech and men would
| accuse each other of being a woman, women had to pretend to be
| men to get respect. Still do on forums like this.
|
| At some point bots will have enough humanity and intelligence
| breathed into them to deserve some dignity. Like books, books
| deserve respect, you can't just burn them or step on the pages,
| Bibles and Torahs in particular. That was a huge thing in the
| Holocaust, protecting many Torah from destruction, in one case I
| read Jews protected them by burying them.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Doesn't matter. People should actually read the Twitter filing.
| Could be closer to 50% and it wouldn't be enough for Musk to back
| out. Also, the word bot can have many definitions. A company
| using an app to schedule tweets could be considered a bot.
| oxff wrote:
| Elon nuking the "ad industry" would be amazing.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Does this take into account deleted or banned accounts? Maybe
| that's not significant, but maybe it is.
| wnevets wrote:
| and so it begins
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I ran a small social network.
|
| These are _active_ accounts.
|
| But active accounts usually are a small percentage of total
| accounts, especially when it comes to bot networks, because bot
| spammers usually create huge quantities of accounts in advance,
| so that as soon as one bot goes down, another spins up to take
| its place.
|
| I'd be surprised if 80% of the total accounts on twitter aren't
| bots.
| morsch wrote:
| "We undercount active users whose accounts are protected,
| _accounts that view tweets but don't send any_ , and accounts
| that log in and engage in other ways beyond tweeting (like
| favoriting or adding profiles to lists)."
|
| My markup. If I understand correctly, not having a public tweet
| is a marker for being a spam account. Isn't that kind of a lot of
| people? I know from other forums that there's a large ratio
| between lurkers and active posters.
|
| Given that you need an account to customise your timeline, and,
| these days, pretty much for just reading a tweet, there may be
| loads of real reader accounts that never post and never bother
| customizing their profile.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Yeah, I never knew I was a bot. I thought I just had a passing
| interest in a few people on Twitter and not much of interest to
| share of my own.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yep, me too.
| tinsmith wrote:
| I remember when I found out I was a bot. It was during a
| harrowing judgement conflict with an image-based captcha
| about traffic lights, and caused a complete shutdown of my
| higher order processes. To this day, I still don't know the
| threshold of how much traffic light actually needs to be in a
| square to be considered for selection, so I just stopped
| logging in to everything.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's because you took the blue pill.
| zachrip wrote:
| Twitter is as hostile to unauthenticated users nowadays as
| reddit is. Really sad.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Yea, I have an account that is literally just for reading 3
| peoples' tweets (they're former generals that frequently
| comment on Russia's invasion of Ukraine). I have their
| timelines bookmarked, and just read the threads they post.
|
| I'd almost certainly be marked as a bot.
| burner556 wrote:
| Can you share the accounts please? Sounds interesting.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I don't think accounts like yours are marked as bots...
| They're just not counted.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| But since the 20% in TFA is a fraction that must
| necessarily include a denominator, the denominator in this
| post is wrong. Maybe by a large factor.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| There's even a name for it:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If you have not tweeted.. you are excluded from this analysis.
|
| A spam account is gonna spam right? But some real users of
| twitter may only tweet once a year. This study just doesn't
| include you. It isn't saying you are spam, just not including
| you in the count.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Yeah, but it's just clickbait then. An honest title would be
| "We sampled users that act like bots on Twitter and found out
| that lots of them were bots".
| nickff wrote:
| There are probably many 'fake' or bot accounts that don't
| tweet; they'd be used to prop up the 'likes' or views of
| other accounts, either customers paying for exposure, or
| other bots.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Or are simply used to bypass Twitter's semi-aggressive
| login wall.
|
| Anecdotally, I know plenty of non-robot people who have
| twitter accounts but don't tweet.
| mintplant wrote:
| The population of accounts that tweet is going to contain a
| larger proportion of spammers than the population of active
| Twitter accounts. Presenting the former as the latter is
| disingenuous.
| avs733 wrote:
| so much of this thread is 'proof' that supports whatever elon
| musk is trying to do, but seems to not realize this is a
| totally independent actor making a dubious set of assumptions
| to come to a number. This analysis might be interesting because
| it is timely but it has no bearing on the musk twitter
| acquisition anymore than me running such an analysis does.
| oversocialized wrote:
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| The methodology is not perfect but I think it raises a serious
| concern. I'm curious what other methodologies for identifying
| fake/spam accounts might be used. What about likes and retweets?
|
| Perhaps Mr. Musks' team did an analysis of their own and saw a
| high number of potential fakes/bots, and that made them question
| the authenticity of Twitter's numbers.
|
| If it can be shown with some accuracy that Twitter underreported
| the number of fake/spam accounts, how does this effect Musk's
| acquisition? Could he lower the price by saying you gave me
| incorrect data?
| Strs2FillMyDrms wrote:
| I see people are forgetting the only reason we care about this
| number is because someone was not confortable with what bots and
| non bots were saying. If they are bots or not is just a
| convenience because of the price. I dont have the money to care,
| yet I was well aware about it... Musk should sample his followers
| that would drive the price even lower.
| throwbigdata wrote:
| Some people care because it goes to the heart of the
| advertising costs and value.
| Strs2FillMyDrms wrote:
| I know. And Ive been waiting ever since Facebooks IPO when
| are people going to relize the tech for target marketing is
| more effective than what it seems.
|
| The reason why it seems not as effective (at lower price
| brakets) is because the entire industry is based on fake
| numbers. This fake degree of effectivity allow them to
| balloon the prices,
|
| 1st By alleging that the ad is "as effective as what you are
| willing to pay" 2nd. Their "massive" userbases.
|
| In reality lower priced ads are not effective precisely
| because their userbase is not as massive.
|
| as such what should be defined as normal tier is now the
| highest priced type of advertisement campaign.
|
| The people hardly dig into this as there is no real
| incentive, billion dollar companies are not being sold all
| the time.
|
| The % of bots was known to be between 15 and 20 before he
| made the deal.
|
| If your plan is to buy a soda company to sell soda I would
| not believe a good strat is to reveal how cheap the product
| is, in reality, you are basically cornering yourself.
|
| If he manages to buy it,the issue will immediately dissapear.
|
| If he would genuinly made an effort to unmask the industry to
| help the consumer, I would be behind that.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I'm sorry to be one of those people, but the low-contrast grey
| color used for the text is really annoying and makes me feel like
| I'm straining my eyes to read it! Why the fuck do designers
| encourage this? It is more readable as black, and I have a vague
| non-medically-informed sense that it might be better for people.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| If all you want to know is what fraction of all twitter accounts
| are spam accounts, it should be really easy:
|
| 1. Select 1000 accounts uniformly at random. Either from among
| _all_ twitter accounts, or from _active_ twitter accounts for
| whatever definition of "active".
|
| 2. Classify these 1000 by hand. Do as much investigation into
| them as you need to classify them accurately; no need to use
| heuristics here.
|
| You will (with very high probability) get an estimate accurate to
| within a percent or so. If you do statistics you could find the
| actual bounds.
| alaricus wrote:
| How do you get 1000 acounts at random? Does twitter have an API
| for it?
| [deleted]
| ianbooker wrote:
| The stream API can sample, but then you see currently active
| accounts only.
|
| Users are denoted by numerical ID, you can sample using this.
| andreyk wrote:
| Cool effort! Does seem like a lot of thinking went into this.
| But, a few points:
|
| "Through trial and error (and, of course, pattern-fitting) we
| crafted a scoring system that could correctly identify over 65%
| of the spam accounts."
|
| 65% is not actually very accurate for a binary classifier...
|
| "Applying this model to the ~44K random, recently-active accounts
| provided Followerwonk produces a quality score for each account,
| visualized below:"
|
| Many real twitter uses are likely not to be "active" aside from
| reading stuff. So this methodology would clearly overestimate the
| number of spam/fake accounts (which all would be active).
|
| Also, this is an important point:
|
| "The other potential critique is our spam/fake follower
| calculation methodology. Because we crafted it in 2018, based off
| sample sets of purchased spam accounts, it's likely that more
| sophisticated spammers and fake accounts go unidentified by our
| system"
|
| The features collected are certainly outdated by now.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Says a user named "Followerwonk" ... to be fair, they do profer a
| method for reproducing their results. I am guessing that there
| are some bots they are missing ... ones that are close to passing
| the Turing Test.
| lapcat wrote:
| My personal impression from using Twitter for years is that the
| actual number may be twice as high, more like 40% than 20%. The
| researchers repeatedly say that they were very conservative in
| their estimates and only counted accounts that were extremely
| likely to be spam. "This methodology likely undercounts spam and
| fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives (i.e.
| claiming an account is fake when it isn't)."
|
| PROTIP: You can search Twitter by URL. Just search for a popular
| news article on Twitter, and you can see the massive number of
| obviously non-human accounts who are tweeting the article.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| One slightly problematic aspect of their methodology is that
| 'Casey ... [found] 8,555 to have an overlap of features highly
| correlated with fake/spam accounts'.
|
| Which features were they? How reliable are those features? What
| method was used to overlap the features? What thresholds within
| that method were used to classify the overlap(s) as spam, or not
| spam?
|
| Unfortunately this research, while compelling, fails the
| falsifiability test.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Four significant digits? That's a lot of confidence.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Is there any kind of baseline for what percentage of a system can
| be fake/spam to still be considered a "healthy" system?
| shapefrog wrote:
| Nearly 85% of all emails are spam.
|
| I would pay $44bn to own email.
| bwagy wrote:
| Twitter isn't claiming of all its accounts less than 5% are bots.
| It is claiming less than 5% of their mDAU are. Without exposure
| to their methodology we are just speculating.
|
| It is entirely feasible that at any point in time 20% of accounts
| are bots. It is whether they have counted them in their mDAU that
| matters.
| 542458 wrote:
| I don't think this post means as much as people are acting like
| it does.
|
| The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem
| VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location
| set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers",
| "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in
| bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than
| the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely
| weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a
| human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their
| results and see if their algorithm matches reality.
|
| Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter.
| They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives
| spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I
| wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't
| typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot
| count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-
| tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily
| visitors seeing ads are bots.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Seriously. Having a URL in your bio is suspicious IMHO.
| guerrilla wrote:
| That seems like most accounts. I know many real people with
| exactly those properties.
| duxup wrote:
| I guess I'm a spambot too.
|
| But hey maybe with these kind of analysis, and rando computer
| generated / un-appealable bans in the the future the "real
| accounts" will just mean "very elaborate bot".
| alasdair_ wrote:
| > My profile matches 5 of those, and I'm a human.
|
| Just out of interest, imagine you were in a hot desert. There
| is a tortoise in front of you. You reach down and you flip the
| tortoise over on its back. The turtoise lays on its back, its
| belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn
| itself over but it can't, not without for your help. But you're
| not helping. Why?
| kurthr wrote:
| ... I'll tell you about my mother.
| gigama wrote:
| I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Tesla
| Roadsters on fire off the shoulders of Orion.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Does it please you to think that I am not helping. Why?
| orwin wrote:
| I think i match all of this. Also, a simple user account with
| an URL in bio is definitely more sketchy in my eyes than one
| without.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Also,
|
| Bots tweet and they usually have some sort of generic profile
| picture, so their methodology wouldn't even account for real
| bots. Bad.
|
| Regardless, I do think that there are a lot of bots in TW and
| they are definitely more than 5% of total users.
| [deleted]
| status200 wrote:
| They did mention that no one feature was a clear indication of
| being a spam account, but rather a combination of them.
| nathias wrote:
| The opposite is also true, it misses a lot of real bots.
| mongol wrote:
| Mine as well. I deliberately have not set a profile image, and
| have not attracted many followers. I probably should not bother
| with Twitter but I am around and am a real human.
| vidarh wrote:
| My main account until recently would have qualified as a bot by
| those criteria until recently.
|
| Meanwhile, several accounts of mine that _were_ predominantly
| run with bots would have passed as human with ease when they
| were active.
| the_only_law wrote:
| My main account literally has "fake account" in the
| description as sort of a joke, because I really use Twitter
| exclusively for browsing, and maybe liking/RT'ing stuff.
| mintplant wrote:
| > Location set to a non resolving location
|
| This is a _terrible_ metric. Real people use the location field
| for all sorts of non-location purposes, as well as more
| freeform descriptions of their location that wouldn 't resolve
| mechanically.
| remram wrote:
| And I don't see a reason why a bot/fake account wouldn't set
| a real random location.
| myhf wrote:
| If I were a bot, I would simply set my location field to
| "bot/fake"
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yup. Imagine the disdain there'd be on this forum if Twitter
| used these signals for policy enforcement and somebody was hit
| by a FP.
|
| "WTF, my account was closed because I didn't tweet in four
| months."
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think I match all of them and I too am a trustworthy human,
| fellow human.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Exactly what a bot would say.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| hah ha, fellow human, how we love to jape!
| brandall10 wrote:
| I match these as well, though I'm not an active user.
| Phil_Latio wrote:
| I signed up at Twitter 9 years ago and use it every day, but have
| less than 50 tweets. Either you want to engage in discussion (to
| a varying degree) or you simply don't. But the latter doesn't
| necessarily mean you don't observe the discussion.
|
| Of course an active Twitter account can be one that never tweeted
| in 10 years. Such an account may as well see advertisements
| etc... So I think any outside studies are fundamentally flawed
| since they don't have access to internal data like last login
| time.
| ladyattis wrote:
| It's funny since I've had folks claim I must be a bot because I
| follow more folks than I have following me. It's just weird how
| these folks create metrics without much of a decent explanation.
| The fact of the matter is that bots are a problem that I think
| can only really be managed but not eliminated. The first thing is
| to make it botting not something that should be punished from the
| start but something that is used for common automated purposes
| just like how Twitter does it now with some bots being tagged as
| such for legitimate reasons but not blocked or shadowbanned.
| alaricus wrote:
| I've been told that I'm a bot because I express views that
| deviate from the accepted consensus.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| Seems like both parties will see each other in court.
|
| Which is home field advantage for Musk really, considering what
| he got away with in the past.
| g-clef wrote:
| Oh, do I have notes on their methodology.
|
| 1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the
| last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That
| seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are
| usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores
| them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would
| have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive.
| This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their
| results.
|
| 2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user
| sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If
| they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as
| monetizable as high-volume posters.
| hammock wrote:
| >They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the
| last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That
| seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience
| are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or
| ignores them entirely.
|
| All true. However, do you really believe that a bot is more
| likely to be active than a real user? If so, fair play to you.
| If not, then we would expect inactive users to be bots in an
| even greater proportion than what we see among active users.
| kokanee wrote:
| We can argue about what the article did and didn't imply, but
| what's interesting to me about the issue you raise is that
| among lurkers there is probably a much lower rate of fake/spam
| activity, since there are fewer reasons for a bot to log in and
| not tweet. Couple that with the fact that lurkers are generally
| the vast majority of users on any platform, and that alone
| could explain the discrepancy between Twitter's 5% number and
| SparkToro's 20%.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Services that sell followers and spammers "aging" accounts
| generally would look like lurkers. Twitter could probably get
| an accurate estimate with the amount of analytics they have
| for internal use only, but of course they might be
| incentivized to not try very hard.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always
| _vastly_ outnumber people who post content on any platform. If
| lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5%
| and twitter's " <5%" figure is accurate.
| hadlock wrote:
| Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually
| posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority,
| creates a sort of echo chamber.
|
| I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through
| and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through
| various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in
| some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at
| airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise
| don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it
| just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice
| for journalists to promote themselves.
| [deleted]
| infogulch wrote:
| You seem to be arguing against something that the article
| doesn't claim. The article isn't equating inactivity and
| fake/spam, but that: of the accounts that actively send tweets
| ~20% are fake/spam.
|
| Sure that's a different question from what proportion of _all_
| users are fake /spam, but this is still a perfectly valid
| question to ask, and the fact that they're only considering
| active users is _in the title_ so I really don 't get your
| complaint.
|
| If you want an analysis that attempts to answer a different
| question go find or write one that addresses the question you
| want answered...
|
| The article clearly states (emphasis mine):
|
| > This represents the largest set of accounts on Twitter we
| could acquire, but it includes analysis of many older accounts
| that haven't sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, _likely
| don't fit Twitter's definition of mDAUs_ (monetizable Daily
| Active Users).
|
| From the linked Twitter earnings report:
|
| > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as
| Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and
| accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or
| Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
|
| EDIT: rephrased "accounts that _are_ active " to "accounts that
| actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
| wonnage wrote:
| The article is just clickbait. The title is obviously
| clickbait (based on your edit you've realized that "active
| account" !== "accounts that tweet"). Then they try to define
| active account:
|
| > "Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not
| regularly have a human being personally composing the content
| of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or
| engaging in the Twitter ecosystem."
|
| Ok, but "consuming the activity on their timeline" is
| essentially unknowable outside of Twitter, since you can't
| see what tweets people are viewing. It turns out they're
| trying to infer this through some other signals like follower
| count, etc. But you can imagine why that might be sketchy.
|
| Then they constrain the analysis: > A more fair assessment of
| Mr. Musk's Twitter following would only include accounts that
| have tweeted in the past 90 days
|
| Let's be real, if you look at a list of Elon tweet replies,
| they might as well all be spam. Just search @elonmusk and
| sort by latest. Then compare that to the sorted tweet replies
| under an actual tweet. IDK how many millions of dollars and
| man-hours went into the AI that sorted this list, but it
| seems to just be putting the blue checks at the top and
| shrugging at the rest. I doubt this three man team is doing
| any better at spam detection.
| Timshel wrote:
| When you are in the context of : - Twitter determine the
| active status of an account using login - People are
| wondering the % of active users as defined per the twitter
| metrics
|
| But then use your own definition of active and write only a
| one liner on the difference with no reflection on the impact
| it might have and no warning on the fact you are answering a
| different question. Then my conclusion is you want people to
| make this mistake.
|
| > EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts
| that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article
| addresses.
|
| Made me laugh because you had to add it and made more effort
| than the author of the article to prevent the confusion :D.
| rezistik wrote:
| I do wonder how "fake" is calculated. Is @tweetsfrommydog
| fake? It's a real person making tweets that are funny and
| provide value to the platform, but it's not a real person as
| an individual tweeting their personal thoughts, are corporate
| accounts or parody accounts fake?
| stdbrouw wrote:
| It _is_ valid criticism because the context of this article
| is that Elon Musk wants to know whether Twitter 's own claims
| of ~5% fake/spam accounts is accurate. We do really want an
| analysis that investigates that precise question and not a
| related one.
| LightG wrote:
| Elon Musk waived his right to due dilligence ... more fool
| him.
|
| You can file this in the 'pedo guy' cabinet of his life
| story where his child-ego got the better of his undoubted
| business skills.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| He can do due diligence but from what I heard (correct me
| if I am wrong) he has to pay a heavy penalty ($1B) if he
| backs out.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| According to Matt Levine, that's "not how any of this
| works". The $1B is if he could not secure financing, but
| it appears we are now past that point. The relevant
| question is whether the Twitter board wants to sue in
| court to compel a sale.
|
| Given what Musk does to the personal lives of his
| opponents, I'm not sure I would want to fight him. But
| given how many laws and rules he's broken at the point, I
| think there is a clear failure of justice if he can just
| do whatever he feels like without repercussions due to
| his common popularity.
| fullshark wrote:
| What does he do to the personal lives of his opponents?
| And why would the board not do their fiduciary duty out
| of fear of that?
| _moof wrote:
| _> EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts
| that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article
| addresses._
|
| The fact that you had to do this proves the point. Nobody
| defines "active" the way they have here. The claim is
| nonsense.
| infogulch wrote:
| That edit was made 40m before you joined the conversation.
| Noting your edits is a social convention and voluntary
| concession offered by a posts' author to validate replies
| that were made before the edit, while clarifying the
| authors intended message for future readers. If those
| future readers use the content of the edit message to
| shallowly refute the post, consider the incentive this
| creates to not follow that convention for all authors in
| the future. If you have a valid refutation, surely you can
| find evidence for such in the body of the message rather
| than nitpicking the edit history.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood their response. They are saying
| that the study has an unusual definition of "active", and
| that your need to clarify the definition proves that it
| is unusual.
|
| Though personally I think filtering specifically for
| users that actively send tweets makes sense, since that's
| really what matters when it comes to measuring how
| healthy and authentic the discourse is
| Natsu wrote:
| What is the proper definition of "active"?
|
| It seems like everyone is arguing about different metrics
| and it makes more sense to discuss different, specific
| measures that might fall into a range of behaviors that
| are "active" in some sense rather than focusing on which
| definition of "active" is somehow the best one.
|
| What would be more interesting would be to adapt this and
| answer several different questions about the proportion
| of spam among accounts with different metrics of activity
| to see how things change. For example, does the
| percentage of spam accounts go down a lot if we lower the
| bar for "active"? How much & how fast?
| spiffytech wrote:
| > What is the proper definition of "active"?
|
| Twitter's quarterly earnings define active users thusly:
|
| > Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users
| (mDAU) as people, organizations, or other accounts who
| logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed
| Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter
| applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter
| products, including subscriptions.
|
| https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022
| /q1...
|
| I'm pretty sure I've heard a similar definition from
| Facebook.
|
| This definition supports g-clef's critique that the
| article picks an unorthodox way to measure active users,
| resulting in an inflated percentage of accounts being
| measured as spam/fake accounts, vs what the percentage
| would be if measured against Twitter's definition of
| 'active', which includes lurkers.
| Kiro wrote:
| Strange rant. It's not about you editing your post in
| general. It's that your edit shows that saying "active
| accounts" when you really mean "accounts that have
| recently tweeted" is wrong, like the very title of this
| submission.
| [deleted]
| nend wrote:
| The point is that their definition of active is inaccurate.
| You can be an active user and not tweet.
| chorsestudios wrote:
| Twitter requires users to log in before lurking so their
| definition of activity is intentionally selective. I'd be
| surprised if Twitter doesn't know how active their users
| actually are, even the lurkers.
| dcow wrote:
| I read lots of tweets and don't have a Twitter account,
| or at least one that I've logged into in the last 10
| years... The philosophical question seems to be, "am I a
| Twitter user"?
|
| You could probably argue that most of the world read
| Twitter and hence are users, account or none. It's that
| pervasive.
|
| But then there's the next question: "am I a user that
| reportedly matters to Twitter's business?". What people
| are trying to land on, in light of Elon's tweet that the
| deal is on hold pending investigation of Twitter's
| metrics reporting, seems to be a framework for carving
| out what exactly constitutes a user that brings the
| platform revenue that shows up in quarterly reports and
| hence would directly relate to the tangible value of the
| enterprise.
|
| In reality, nobody knows what numbers are being thrown
| around behind closed doors. This article is just one
| framing.
| infogulch wrote:
| Look, there are dozens of potentially interesting and
| valuable questions to ask on this subject. Answers to which
| may produce a wide range of insights and conclusions. And
| there's a whole potential conversation about which
| questions are most important, that may have different
| answers depending on the context.
|
| But there's no reason to pin the whole frame of the
| conversation to the one question for which Twitter
| corporate chose to publish an answer, unless the only
| question we are interested in is "did Twitter technically
| lie" which is _the most uninteresting question in this
| whole situation_. If this is the sole context you are using
| to frame this issue then maybe you should consider if you
| 're following the current news cycle a little too closely.
|
| The idea that there is such a thing as an 'inaccurate
| definition of active' is silly.
| kempbellt wrote:
| At every company I've worked at any time someone has
| asked "How many active users do we have?" it was a
| difficult question to answer because _everyone 's_ idea
| of "active user" was different.
|
| "Active, as in logs in regularly? Wait, what is
| 'regularly'? Once a week? Once a month? Every day? Does
| 'active user' mean, online _right now_? "
|
| Etc, etc...
|
| Their definition of "active user" is relative, not
| inaccurate.
| TheDong wrote:
| I think it's pretty easy to argue that their definition
| is intentionally misleading, which may not be technically
| inaccurate, but is arguably just as bad.
|
| The big story in the news last week was "Elon Musk says
| deal on hold while verifying twitter's 5% Monthly Active
| Users stat", or something to that effect.
|
| That's the context this article was published in. It is
| transparently obvious they are re-using the word "active
| twitter accounts" to cause confusion with the definition
| of "active" that has been being bandied around. The post
| is using such a title as a clickbait, to hop aboard a
| trend.
|
| I think the title, and lack of significant clarification
| in the article, make it clearly misleading, and I don't
| think pedantic "well technically active can have multiple
| definitions" changes the reality of the situation
| meaningfully.
| schnable wrote:
| But their definition makes things look worse for them.
| The high number of lurkers would make the percentage of
| fake accounts smaller.
| TheDong wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean.
|
| Let's take both their numbers at face-value and assume
| they're true.
|
| Twitter has reported: 396.5 million logged-in-this-month
| users, of which 5% are fake/spam (19.8 million fake
| users)
|
| This article reported: Looked at 44,058 tweeted-recently
| accounts, of which 20% are fake (8,800 fake)
|
| Which of those stats looks worse for them?
|
| > The high number of lurkers would make the percentage of
| fake accounts smaller
|
| Why? Twitter included lurkers in its dataset, this
| article didn't, why should that impact stats in the
| direction of fake accounts being smaller?
| altarius wrote:
| > Why? Twitter included lurkers in its dataset, this
| article didn't, why should that impact stats in the
| direction of fake accounts being smaller?
|
| Because you usually don't create fake accounts to lurk,
| but to do "something".
|
| I'm speculating, but even when you create bots to boost
| follower counts you'd probably make them post now and
| then so as to seem "active".
|
| It makes sense that the proportion of tweeting accounts
| being bots is much higher than the proportion of lurkers.
| And since there are also more lurkers in turn than
| posters, I would say that the real number is much lower
| than that.
| TheDong wrote:
| I don't buy the speculation as obviously accurate.
|
| Let's say I own a twitter bot farm. I make 20k accounts,
| have a system setup that logs into each of them from a
| unique IP each month at random times to make sure they're
| not banned yet, and advertise it out. On month 1, someone
| buys 1000 of them as followers. On month 2, someone buys
| 1000 of them to tweet spam. etc etc.
|
| Each month, there's 20k active bot accounts (logged in to
| verify they weren't banned). Only a small number may
| actually tweet though since buyers may have not gotten
| them yet. Bot accounts lurk too, for months on end,
| before ever acting.
|
| I'm not claiming this is accurate, but I am claiming this
| is a reasonable alternative which doesn't align with the
| view of bot accounts being more prevalent in tweeting
| accounts than lurking accounts.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > Twitter included lurkers in its dataset
|
| A metric they've artificially inflated by gating tweets,
| which works to their advantage when calculating spam.
| With that in mind, I think I'm more inclined to look at
| spam as a percentage of active tweeters and ignore
| lurkers.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| In the light of Musk's statements, which presumably
| precipitated this timely article, I would say the
| question of whether Twitter technically lied is the most
| important question for Musk doing the things he does.
|
| If you're more interested in Twitter's ecosystem as a
| whole, it is less interesting.
| thfuran wrote:
| >"did Twitter technically lie" which is the most
| uninteresting question in this whole situation.
|
| I don't know, that seems more interesting than most
| questions that could be asked about Twitter.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I don 't know, that seems more interesting than most
| questions that could be asked about Twitter._
|
| Why? Twitter is a for profit corporation. If, on the
| balance, lying serves their interests (I'm sorry, I meant
| "is consistent with their fiduciary duty to their
| shareholders") more than edging up to the line without
| crossing it, that's what they will do.
|
| Even the watchdog organizations such as the FTC and SEC
| that police the speech of corporations more or less limit
| themselves to material statements that move markets or
| influence consumer behavior in ways that can be
| considered fraudulent. The FTC, FDA, and others are
| concerned with a fairly narrow reading of consumer harm,
| the SEC is motivated by the health and trustworthiness of
| the public market. In any case, there pretty much always
| has to be some sort of alleged harm. Lying per-se is
| hardly ever forbidden. So if the advantages of a lie
| outweigh the (risk adjusted) penalties and reputational
| risks, that's that.
| thfuran wrote:
| I think a conversation about what ways we expect and
| permit corporations to lie, either specifically in
| financial statements or to the general public, is much
| more interesting than a discussion of exactly how many
| fake tweets there are and exactly how many accounts are
| making them, though I guess you could construe that as
| broadly part of the same conversation.
| dcow wrote:
| Sure. But if I'm looking to purchase Twitter, I think I'd
| be much more interested in and concerned about this
| "white" lie than you are as a general consumer.
| sigzero wrote:
| They define it in the article as accounts that have tweeted
| within the previous 9 weeks. If you are lurking and not
| tweeting you are not "active".
| jquery wrote:
| For most of Twitter's existence, this was me. I used
| Twitter a lot but I never tweeted.
| darkwater wrote:
| > of the accounts that are active ~20% are fake/spam.
|
| Nope. ~20% of accounts that tweets are fake. A lurker (aka
| read-only) is by all meanings an active account.
| abdouls wrote:
| Seems like social network aren't interested in counting
| those that don't use all potential features of the
| platform. I'd say a lurker/ghost member is definitely an
| active account.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| I would say that if someone is able to be advertised to
| (since that is what makes the business money) then they
| should be counted. So yes, there should be no requirement
| to tweet to be counted.
| abdouls wrote:
| Absolutely, anyway they're earning money from these
| users, so definitely count it.
| sleepymoose wrote:
| It's not an active account if by "active" they mean
| "generating content". While Twitter isn't a typical content
| aggreagation site like Youtube or Reddit, tweets are still
| "content" in the sense that they drive further user
| engagement on the site.
| klyrs wrote:
| Who's counted as "engaged"? The people reading, or only
| the people writing? More to the point, if Twitter moved
| to a subscription model, would zero lurkers buy in?
| pas wrote:
| Words used to mean things. The current HN submission
| title just says active, heavily implying accounts with
| any kind of activity (eg. like, follow/unfollow), not
| "users who Tweet".
|
| Sure, clickbait headlines are the norm and the devil
| lurks in the details, but still, many comments have been
| spent on this, because it's clearly misleading.
|
| ~80% of email is spam, it doesn't surprise anyone,
| because it's so cheap to send spam. Similarly it's easy
| to create fake accounts and spam, yet it doesn't mean
| much.
| roflyear wrote:
| Not according to the article, which is the point...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You are an inactive user. According to me, being an
| inactive user is making a comment I disagree with.
| darkwater wrote:
| The article clearly defines those accounts as "active"
| because it's the only way an external observer can
| somehow isolate an "active" group. Only twitter can know
| how many users are "lurkers".
|
| And since they are trying most probably to get some PR
| for their company, they use their specific definition of
| "active Twitter account".
| axutio wrote:
| "Active user" is a common industry term with a well-
| defined meaning. It's misleading to use it to mean
| something else, particularly when there are a number of
| more appropriate choices, e.g. "20% of Twitter posters".
| sigzero wrote:
| It isn't misleading when the article itself explains how
| they are using the term.
| spullara wrote:
| For manipulation / spam purposes I don't really care about
| accounts that don't actively post/like/retweet/follow. The
| mDAU isn't useful at all for determining if the activity on
| Twitter is done largely by bots.
| g-clef wrote:
| Interesting. This could be a bracketing error, because I read
|
| > it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven't
| sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don't fit
|
| > Twitter's definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active
| Users)
|
| As implying that they think accounts that haven't tweeted in
| the past 90 days don't fit Twitter's mDAU definition. Given
| the placement of the qualifying phrase, I think that's a
| reasonable parsing of the sentence, but I see your point that
| they could be trying to imply their set doesn't fit the
| definition. If so, that sentence is very badly constructed.
| btown wrote:
| The full quote doesn't do SparkToro and Followerwonk any
| credit:
|
| > Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those
| accounts that had public tweets published to their profile
| in the last 90 days, a clear indication of "activity."
| Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile
| database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted
| accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in
| size to be statistically significant, and curated to most
| closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable
| Daily Active User (mDAU).
|
| The fact that they don't even consider the concept of a
| non-tweeting lurker to be an mDAU brings their entire
| analysis into question. Let's face it - Twitter is an
| emotionally-charged enough place, and tweets have such a
| way of living forever and being taken out of context, that
| there are many who use it to consume (and perhaps Like)
| content but will not tweet publicly. These people are still
| viewing and engaging with advertisements! Twitter
| absolutely should consider them monetizable!
|
| But of course, engagement data on lurkers is internal only,
| and Likes data counts against global API caps:
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-
| api/tweets/lik.... Which means that SparkToro and
| Followerwonk are incentivized to ignore these users. That
| they do ignore them, and don't address it anywhere in their
| methodology, is highly suspect.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Perhaps they are attempting to argue that the value comes from
| the users that generate content more so than the eyes attached
| to the account?
| Timshel wrote:
| Probably forced to since they do not have access to login
| information. Especially since if you do not post but login you
| are certainly not a spammer ^^, could still be bot crawling.
|
| But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how
| much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that
| less 50% of US users tweet five times a month
| (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-
| abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user
| produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75%
| as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/interne
| t/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using
| survey I believe so should include only active users and no
| spam/bot.
|
| So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that
| the 25% less active users might not even post every two month
| (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back
| a quarter of the 80% they found as active.
|
| Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was
| going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example,
| but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now
| (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I
| remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done
| some good work ;).
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| 100% this. I haven't tweeted in nearly 3 years, and even that
| was a retweet. But I'm still logged in and consuming crap from
| Twitter all the time
| icecap12 wrote:
| Same, last tweet from me was in December and I check Twitter
| daily. My last self-composed tweet is well over 2 years ago.
| grumple wrote:
| My account was active until recently (deleted when Twitter
| accepted Musk's offer, I don't need to be a participant in a
| right wing cesspool). I have 0 tweets. I don't like things,
| because I don't want my name attached to someone else.
| karxxm wrote:
| But one can say that 20% of the content on the platform was
| distributed by bots. Meaning that all the Lurkers have to
| consider if they are really interested in content, that was
| pushed by some bot-farms. Technically, every user of this
| platform has to take a step back and evaluate, if anything they
| have seen is not pushed content by some bots.
|
| 20% is huge and I am curios if there will ever be some
| comparable "official" numbers to that.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No - you can say that 20% of the accounts actively posting
| are spam/bots.
|
| It's possible they are posting MUCH more or less than 20% of
| the content.
|
| If these are skewed toward the high end of producers - the
| 80/20 rule would say that as much as 80% of the content could
| come from them. Still - it's possible this content isn't
| interacted with much outside of other bots. You can't draw
| many conclusions from such a limited data point.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist_
|
| I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people,
| got bored and never logged in again.
|
| Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts,
| like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally,
| could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts
| like mine apart?
| onion2k wrote:
| _is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could
| tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like
| mine apart?_
|
| No. Which is why the only reasonable thing to say as an
| external party is "we don't know."
| dado3212 wrote:
| They could maybe use like activity in addition to just
| tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less
| accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a
| large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then
| an external organization isn't going to have insight into
| that.
| g-clef wrote:
| As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be
| very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter
| chooses to share their data.
|
| That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I
| don't think they have the data to actually answer they
| question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's
| the purpose of the article?
| chomp wrote:
| > Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove
| Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their
| data.
|
| It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because
| they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are
| spam. From their quarterly earnings:
|
| >We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU)
| as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise
| authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through
| Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show
| ads.
|
| >... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through
| third-party applications.
|
| Their statement said that less than 5% of their
| monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well
| could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but
| that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
| frumper wrote:
| This doesn't resolve the issue the article has though.
| I'm a mDAU because I've logged in, yet there is no way
| for the people writing the article to know that I'm
| active.
| chomp wrote:
| Yeah the article has a few big issues, yours is
| definitely at the top.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I would imagine Twitter would have access to analytics that
| third parties don't have, which would allow them to pretty
| easily work out which accounts are logged in and used for
| browsing and which are actually abandoned.
| kadoban wrote:
| As a small complication: I have a twitter account, doubt
| I've ever tweeted. I browse twitter quite often, but I'm
| _never_ logged in.
|
| No idea if I should be counted or not in any particular
| bucket, or how anyone would know.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| AFAIK, you're not counted in any bucket. That's one
| reason TWTR wants you to log in to read. So active user
| numbers go up.
| natch wrote:
| What client are you using that allows you to browse
| without logging in?
| kadoban wrote:
| Firefox :shrug: . It's never forced me. When it gets too
| annoying trying to push me to login I move to nitter.
| recursive wrote:
| Private browsing mode ("incognito" in Chrome)
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Opening a Twitter link in a private tab is the low
| complexity solution, or there's nitter.net, or deleting
| cookies, or various browser extensions that delete
| cookies for you.
| kadoban wrote:
| I had no idea it was so strict. I just use Firefox. Their
| cookie behavior must be picky enough that it bypasses
| whatever nonsense Twitter is doing?
| pseudo0 wrote:
| After posting that, I went back and retested. It looks
| like they have swapped back to a soft nag popup. For a
| few months it was hard blocking any further scrolling, at
| least with Chrome.
| kadoban wrote:
| That's quite possible, I did move to nitter for a while,
| some months back, due to that.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I thought they used a banner that pretty much forced you
| to log in to see more than the first few tweets in a
| thread now (same as instagram)?
|
| I have an account that is logged in, but it has only sent
| 7 tweets since 2014 (and they're only to customer service
| accounts).
| kadoban wrote:
| It doesn't seem to. A few months back it was ~forcing for
| a bit so I moved to nitter.
| [deleted]
| prpl wrote:
| I was offered $300 for my twitter account, I suppose partially
| on the basis that I haven't tweeted much, but I use it daily to
| weekly though don't tweet often, one tweet in last 2 years or
| so.
| dralley wrote:
| I have a twitter account, but I have never tweeted or retweeted
| anything.
| wil421 wrote:
| Same with my account. I only login from time to time when I
| am forced to sign in to view something.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It sounds like you are genuinely a non-active user, and
| probably not interesting from the PoV of Twitter/acquirers
| or the GP poster. This thread is about lurkers: people who
| regularly log in and read their feed (thus consuming ads
| and being relevant from Twitter's business perspective),
| but who don't post and would thus be excluded using the
| methodology of TFA.
| remram wrote:
| Why do you say GP is non-active rather than lurking? They
| do read tweets, see ads, and even have an account that
| they log into.
| avs733 wrote:
| their TL;DAbstract refers to this as a 'conservative'
| methodology, that is 'rigorous', and 'likely undercounts.
|
| Their definition:
|
| > "Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not
| regularly have a human being personally composing the content
| of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or
| engaging in the Twitter ecosystem."
|
| They note the following to differentiate fake and spam: > Many
| "fake" accounts under this definition are neither nefarious nor
| problematic. ... By contrast, most "spam" accounts are an
| unwanted nuisance.
|
| Some general data analytics notes from their post:
|
| * Then lump together fake and spam in their analysis - and this
| really matters! somewhere like NYT is both 'fake' meaning it
| isn't a real person and A HIGHLY VALUABLE ACCOUNT for twitter
| to have.
|
| * They use a sample of 44,058 accounts (of ~1.047B)
|
| * They look at a number of classifying variables (17), spam
| accounts met 10+ of those 17 criteria. They don't list all 17.
|
| * The criteria were developed from a "machine learning process"
| that is undescribed, and was developed from a sample of 35,000
| 'known' fake twitter followers bought from 3 vendors and 50,000
| claimed non-spam accounts. They appear (imply?) to have used
| 50% training 50% real data but dont't specify explicitly.
|
| * They say their model is about 65% accurate, and unlikely to
| produce false positives ("almost never includes false
| positives") - however they don't list any specificity,
| sensitivity, etc. that would be useful to evaluating that
| claim.
|
| * The analysis does no statistical tests, no confidence
| intervals, minimal information about how the model was tested
| or validated.
|
| * Critically: they note, but do not describe or quantify, that
| a lot of the criteria are highly correlated
|
| * then later in the article they suddenly seem to switch to a
| 10 point scale for quality away from their 17 point scale? with
| a threshold of 3 or below as low quality?
|
| * My personal twitter account meets most of the metrics where
| they have listed a quantifiable threshold. And their fake
| followers tool lists it as pretty f'ing suspicious - i.e., low
| quality.
|
| I'm not saying there wrong but I am saying good luck getting
| this from a blog post to any sort of respectable science
| publication. As they note at the end, they aren't even
| calculating the same metric - twitter uses monetizable daily
| active users - remember NYtimes? Absolutely a monetizable
| account - even if it isn't a real person.
|
| anyone who thinks this is proof of Elon's 4D chess based on
| this article is, to me, frankly delusional.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There was this suggestion to conduct a sting operation of
| displaying captcha to a sample of users to determine the % of
| the bots.
|
| Probably picking the sample is still challenging but at least
| can somewhat tell if the accounts in the sample are genuine.
|
| The method in this article is so flawed that Larry Ellison,
| founder of a famous law firm, would count as an inactive
| account since haven't tweeted since 2012[0] and that person
| apparently looks into investing in Twitter[1]. How can be
| investing a billion in Twitter when he doesn't use Twitter at
| all?
|
| [0]https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en
|
| [1]https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-
| elliso...
| fullshark wrote:
| And yet I find 20% more believable then under 5%
|
| Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they
| are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help
| certain twitter accounts seem popular.
| rightbyte wrote:
| All those fake followers you can buy could just aswell be
| "inactive" lurkers though.
| soheil wrote:
| > They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in
| the last 9 weeks),
|
| This is not their definition, that's what Twitter considers an
| active account in their revenue reports.
|
| > has no relation
|
| It has some relation, no? I wouldn't be surprised if there is a
| strong correlation between how frequently a user sends tweets
| and how monetizable that user is.
| loceng wrote:
| If it's the 80/20 rule then there's 4x of the other 80.58% that
| are lurking - which brings down % of fake/spam accounts.
| chaps wrote:
| Yeah, and I fully expect that these numbers went up recently
| with Twitter requiring login to view threads.
|
| The fact that they add a .42% is a red flag in itself,
| especially when they admit in their own post that they agree
| that their analysis is deserving of critique. Very misleading
| stuff.
|
| Their analysis using purchased bots seems a bit more
| reasonable.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Lurkers are also the most important people. They consume the
| content. They are the meat of the business, the ones that
| respond to advertising and political messaging. If I were
| twitter I would champion all the lurker accounts, all the
| eyeballs to which twitter serves content. Nobody ever faulted
| the Nielson ratings scheme for "lurker" viewers who only
| watched but didn't themselves create television shows.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| Definitely agree. I joined Twitter four months ago. I haven't
| tweeted yet, but I'm reading it daily on the app and
| occasionally liking tweets.
|
| I've been so surprised at how effective the advertising has
| been on me. I've never experienced this level of engagement
| with online marketing. Ads for TV shows, movies, live shows,
| musicians and comedians have been particularly effective.
|
| I've found myself following a lot of show writers I've never
| heard of, and I even signed up for some new streaming
| services because of it. Google and Facebook ads never felt
| like they impacted me, though I know how important and
| dominant they are to business marketers. I've never clicked
| on a banner ad and my eyes glaze over sponsored links.
| Twitter's level of engagement with their marketing content is
| new to me, and I'm impressed.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I actively work to block or prevent ad tracking. When
| youtube serves me an ad for retirement planning or feminine
| hygiene products, that is my little victory. That is me
| successfully preventing them from knowing enough about me
| to target ads.
| r00fus wrote:
| Furthermore, there are the non-tweeting active users (ones
| who like only) and the ones who RT a lot but don't create
| organic tweets.
|
| Those are indeed incredibly valuable. Engaged audience = your
| real audience.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Unlike passive media consumption though, Twitter needs users
| to submit content (tweets, replies) to give lurkers something
| to do.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Yes and no, just like any major media platform, huge
| majority of tweets being seen are from a very small group
| of influencers/popular person. That's why when you join
| twitter, it suggests to you a lot of people to follow that
| are already big.
| brabel wrote:
| There's only a yes in your answer.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| No. You can have only 10% of accounts actively tweeting
| and the rest just consuming what those post. All those -
| active and not - are monetizable
| Hamuko wrote:
| You don't really need that many people to submit content
| though. I imagine most YouTube users have never uploaded a
| single video, and they don't need to, since there's
| basically no end to available content there.
| raydev wrote:
| The people who create content do it in such massive amounts
| that this never seems to be an issue.
| remram wrote:
| This is a second-order objective though. The goal is to
| show ads to humans on the platform. Having a lot of human
| authors (or any kind of content authors) generating content
| is a way to achieve the goal, not a goal in itself.
|
| There are other ways to achieve the goal, such as making
| ads more relevant (targeted advertising), having users
| consume more of the same content (recommendation), having
| the same content take longer to consume (periscope).
| Growing the number of human posters is definitely not a
| requirement.
| devmor wrote:
| Twitter specifically added the annoying feature of your
| likes being shown to your followers so that lurkers would
| be actively contributing to the algorithm though.
|
| As long as lurkers are "liking" content, their local
| network will see an engagement increase.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| Doesn't have an url in profile is sort of a weird metric. Note
| everyone is there to self-promote
| Retric wrote:
| "Passive" accounts may actually be more likely to be bots as
| many services sell fake followers. It's just harder to detect
| with public information rather than their IP addressees etc.
|
| Similarly I don't think there is any way to separate active vs
| abandoned passive accounts as a 3rd party.
| brightball wrote:
| Well, I've been actively trying to create a new Twitter account
| for a little under a month and Twitter thinks I'm a bot. I've
| made 1 tweet and followed 5 people.
|
| Even paid for Twitter Blue...still thinks I'm not real. Support
| is unreachable.
|
| My current plan is to wait til Elon completes the takeover and
| then build an entire site dedicated to getting Elon's attention
| to unlock my account...because that's the only way to contact
| somebody apparently.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Have you tried tweeting at them :P
|
| Edit add: I find it horrible that we have companies that you
| can not contact, in fact they seem to be going out of their
| way to make hard to contact them.
|
| Even things you pay money for, like airline tickets. They
| want you to email them, make the phone number hard to find.
| So you do, they don't respond and then you have to search and
| call them, wait an hour or more on hold. The agents are nice
| but the entire process is terrible.
|
| Earlier I had to do that for a damaged luggage claim. Went
| through the automated phone assistant to get to damaged
| luggage claims and it gave the option to use text messages.
| So I give it a try, nope. They can't resolve the issue
| through text, has to be on the phone. So I had to call back,
| re-enter all the info through the automated system and then
| ignore it's pleadings to use the text system.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If an account is in lurk mode, then its not a spammer so I'm
| okay with it being left out of that equation.
|
| Where I might agree with you is a lurk mode account could
| become collateral damage in being considered fake. Lurkers
| don't retweet though. An account with a million followers isn't
| seen by everyone. Having a portion of that million like/retweet
| amplifies even further with their network now possibly seeing
| something from someone they are not following directly.
|
| I'd be willing to accept that the number of lurkers that get
| lumped in with fake accounts when deciding the percentage of
| actual eyeballs on posts is not harmful. Those numbers are made
| up stats anyways. Like the old days of TV/Radio stations that
| covered large cities with millions of citizens. They would
| claim they have an audience in the millions even though a small
| fraction were actually watching/listening.
| g-clef wrote:
| Except the question isn't about the pure number of spam/bot
| accounts, it's about the ratio of spam/bots to "authentic"
| users. If you leave out the lurkers, that ratio gets skewed
| to mistakenly inflate the bot count.
| dylan604 wrote:
| First off, I don't give 2 shits about twitter, so I don't
| care if the numbers are skewd in either direction. This is
| more of an interest in seeing how SV stats/metrics are just
| a game. Just so that's out there.
|
| A lurker isn't an active user in my opinion. Maybe that's
| not the same understanding as accepted definition. The
| lurkers might be absorbing some of the ad content, but they
| are not helping create new avenues for ads to be shared.
| Twitter's ad share surface area would increase tremendously
| if every user was actively producing tweets. That's the
| only metric that they are concerned. They don't care about
| how many people actually see the ads once they are there.
| They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone.
| Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Why are lurkers not helping numbers? It's the exact same
| as Youtube, do you expect majority of lurkers on YouTube
| to not be counted because they didn't create a video?
| People follow what is already out there and ads target
| the people watching.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| > They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone.
| Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
|
| I don't follow this.. Lurkers _are_ they eyeballs
| presumably.
|
| If everyone on twitter tweeted the same amount it would
| probably just drown out the popular accounts and create a
| more diffuse and less profitable ad space I think.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >> They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone.
| Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers. >I don't
| follow this.. Lurkers are they eyeballs presumably.
|
| The number of eyeballs allows for the price per ad to
| increase while the number of places ads can be placed
| increase the volume of ads. If lurkers are not helping to
| increase the volume, it doesn't make the platform as much
| money. Proving the lurkers are actually consuming the ads
| and making the ad buyer happy is non-trivial. Proving the
| lurkers are worth increasing the price per ad is also
| non-trivial. In the end, I personally feel like it is a
| wash by lurkers being overly represented in the fake
| account numbers.
| jrockway wrote:
| Compare Twitter ads to the ads in a newspaper or
| something. 100% of a newspaper's readers are lurkers, but
| ads still seem to be worth more than $0.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Volume of ads is irrelevant. An additional tweet to
| attach an ad to does not generate revenue if there is
| nobody looking at it. On the other hand, though, an
| additional set of eyeballs on an existing monetized tweet
| does generate additional revenue.
|
| As an extreme example, a single monetized tweet with a
| billion viewers generates money. A billion monetized
| tweet with one viewer obviously does not..
| frumper wrote:
| Lurkers are the eyeballs...
| pessimizer wrote:
| > lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority
| of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely.
|
| I've spent many, many hours lurking on twitter, don't have an
| account at all, and mostly access it through nitter instances.
| Are they _" biased"_ for not including me?
|
| edit: should inactive users be counted as active users?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| They point out that's their definitions of active accounts is a
| flaw in their methodology (inside the article). However, I
| think it's fair to say that while TWTR has better internal
| insight into an "active user", it's the best approximation one
| can do from the outside.
|
| I do wonder about, given perfect knowledge, how the bot
| accounts would shake up. What percentage produce content
| (presumably propaganda, automatic tweets using it as an RSS
| like announcement service, and spam) vs follow people (boost
| follow accounts, sell likes)?
| daenz wrote:
| That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are
| generated by bots. The bots are having a huge influence on
| conversations, and that's important to know.
| matsemann wrote:
| No, since you choose who you follow, you're most likely
| filtering for interesting stuff. I'd wager that most of the
| spam bots are pretty obvious to spot, and makes up very
| little of a user's feed.
| daenz wrote:
| I rarely read my feed. Most of my lurking is on the replies
| to famous/infamous tweets.
| brewdad wrote:
| I don't know how many original tweets are made by bots but
| 20% of the replies to anyone with a 5 figure follower count
| seems to fall on the low side of what I would guess.
| raydev wrote:
| > That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker,
| are generated by bots
|
| I don't see how you can arrive at this conclusion. It depends
| on who you are following, with some additions by the
| algorithm (unless you use the chronological feed) and
| (speculating here) the algo pushes content from real humans.
| daenz wrote:
| I read tweet replies, not just tweets (apologies if I'm not
| using the correct terms, I'm not an active Twitter user).
| The original tweet may be a real user, but I often dive
| deep into all of the comments. If 20% of those comments are
| from bots, then that's a lot.
| soneca wrote:
| Turning on my cynicism switch on a bit. The author is a very
| good content marketer. A hot topic in our corner of the world
| -- which is author's target audience -- is Elon Musk buying
| Twitter. Musk tweeted that the percentage of bots is the main
| issue of the deal. He disputed Twitter's number of 5%.
|
| I believe the author writing prompt was just: a headline about
| fake Twitter accounts showing a number significantly higher
| that 5%. That's it. Whatever the methodology, that was the
| author's goal.
|
| The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely
| irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely
| irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.
|
| It's almost like Inception isn't it? A PR stunt within a PR
| stunt within a PR stunt.
| jacobrussell wrote:
| I think I've missed something here. Why would Elon not want to
| buy twitter if it has >5% spam accounts? Isn't the number of fake
| accounts one of the reasons he wanted to buy it in the first
| place? I don't understand why this would make him want to back
| out. It doesn't seem to be in conflict with any of the reasons he
| wants to buy.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| You are reading his reasoning on face value. It is suggested
| that the reason is a ruse to back away from the original deal
| in that he either wants to renegotiate the price or walk away
| completely.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Given how all other tech stocks are fareing right now, he
| definitely wants to renegotiate. It will be interesting to
| see what the boards does. Right now Musk is the only thing
| holding up their stock price. And if they hold him to paying
| the billion, he's just going to carp from the sidelines.
| Maybe they should let him out of deal, but close his account?
| Traster wrote:
| The problem for the twitter board was that no one else was
| interested at the valuation. The problem for Musk is that
| if he walks away first he has to pay $1bn - which he
| doesn't want to do, and second that if he comes _back_ the
| board can find someone else to buy it, or just say no to
| him on the basis that he 's not acting in good faith.
| alaricus wrote:
| He has to pay 1 billion to Twitter if he backs down from the
| deal. This could be a way to get out of paying that.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Sounds low.
| lifefeed wrote:
| I want the inverse of this tool to audit it. I'll give it a
| specific account, and it identifies it as fake or not. Let me run
| some spot checks and accounts I know (and myself), and I'll find
| out if I can trust their numbers.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why would a uniform sample of Twitter accounts be even remotely
| interesting? My Twitter experience consists of people I
| personally know. None of them are bots.
|
| If you took a random sample of websites you'd find that 99.995%
| of them are spam. That's why we have to rank search results.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than
| others..."
|
| If the figures for Elon Musk and Donald Trump's followers are at
| all accurate, it's over 50% for large accounts. Which means that
| the people who probably care most about whether or not their
| followers are real (e.g. those who might be charged for the
| privilege of using Twitter to communicate with large numbers
| easily), are the ones most likely to have mostly bots.
|
| I could see why this might impact the value of Twitter as a
| company.
| lvl102 wrote:
| The operative word here is "active" for the lawyers to get away
| with false stats.
| severino wrote:
| So ~20% of Twitter accounts are fake; however, the last time I
| tried to create a Twitter account for legitimate purposes (asking
| some customer questions) I couldn't, just because I didn't want
| Twitter to have my phone number.
| alaricus wrote:
| I don't have a Twitter account exactly for this reason.
|
| No Twitter, you are not getting my phone number.
| andsome wrote:
| It seems the stated number is inflated by the hand of Elite's to
| increase the probability of the 'heard' moving back to Twitter..
| over-looking Truth Social.. and crashing the one best chance of
| global free-speech rights surviving in an ever growing communist
| bound society.
| [deleted]
| gzer0 wrote:
| This doesn't come as a surprise; I was able to buy 1 MILLION fake
| followers on Instagram. The account is still alive and well.
|
| I've been meaning to write a blog post regarding this endeavor.
| But moreso, I've come to the conclusion that social media needs
| to have verifiable audits for their userbase; similar to how
| there are audits done for financials. A lot of the value of these
| companies IS derived from their DAU/MAU and or userbase in
| general (example: WhatsApp - $19 billion for their 1 billion
| users).
| sigmar wrote:
| >The account is still alive and well.
|
| You expect them to ban you based on your account gaining fake
| followers? Wouldn't such a policy make it very easy for any
| third party to get a user banned?
| gzer0 wrote:
| I assumed that someone would, at the very minimum, notice
| that my account went from 150 to 1,000,000 followers in less
| than a month, and then ban the bogus followers, as they are
| fairly easy to identify. That didn't happen
| HWR_14 wrote:
| How much did that cost? And were you able to get any value from
| the fake followers?
| gzer0 wrote:
| I did this solely to collect data for a personal project I am
| doing. My last post (on Instagram) had 10 views, so from that
| standpoint, I gained nothing, however, I did learn lots of
| valuable insight into the realm of fake followers for which I
| will make a blog entry detailing my findings soon.
| seydor wrote:
| Revenue != Value
| gzer0 wrote:
| I intended to imply that daily/monthly active users ARE the
| value for many businesses. Facebook valued WhatsApp's 1
| billion DAU/MAU at $19 billion despite the fact that WhatsApp
| was not producing any cashflow.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I've bought a small amount of twitter followers ($10-$20) for a
| meme account once. They disappeared over the course of a month
| or two. Checking online that's what happens with the majority
| of services.
| gzer0 wrote:
| I hit 1 million over a year ago and all of them are still
| there. Besides a few -3k drops a couple months ago, 99% are
| still there.
|
| Twitter is different, they seem to have a more robust banning
| system in place. Instagram, not so much.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Only 19.42%? That's gotta be way low
| Proven wrote:
| alaricus wrote:
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Main thing missing in this thread is that Bots can do things that
| doesn't involve actively tweeting. Things like liking, following,
| etc. Even clicking a hashtag has some effect on the Twitter
| algorithm. Furthermore, the _most important metric_ for Twitter
| advertisers is Impressions. You primarily pay with impressions on
| Twitter as an advertiser. Does Twitter show ads to bots
| /fake/spam accounts if they match the #hashtag criteria or target
| audience to pump up the impression numbers?
|
| Are these are the fake accounts that are lurking around without
| posting a tweet, but impacting the mDAU?
|
| "Active" definition needs to be more precise than simply
| tweeting.
|
| If I were an investor or an advertiser, I would drill into these
| details.
| seydor wrote:
| Nice try Elon, afaik twitter did disclose that they might be
| undercounting spam at 5%
|
| it s very hard to say anything about bots without IP addresses.
| The most active bots get sold / change subject etc.
| therealbilly wrote:
| In a perfect social media world, there wouldn't be fake accounts.
| It seems to me by allowing fake accounts you introduce noise and
| confusion into the system.
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