[HN Gopher] Twitter CEO: "Let's talk about spam, with the benefi...
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Twitter CEO: "Let's talk about spam, with the benefit of data,
facts, context"
Author : minimaxir
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-05-16 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Regular users don't care if a low-effort post is from a bot or a
| human. They want their feed populated with interesting content.
|
| Also, freedom of speech is good, but for most what actually
| happens is they post whatever "hot take" they have and nobody or
| like 2 people notice.
|
| What's really important is the ranking algorithm your site uses,
| and whether it upweights spam posts, "pop culture" human posts,
| or whatever posts are most relevant / interesting to each user /
| community.
|
| I feel like Elon complaining about spam is really him just making
| up an excuse for suddenly backtracking his offer.
| sbarbarian wrote:
| Musk has a point - the reality is that each and every Twitter
| user wades through obviously fake accounts every time they use
| the service.
|
| this is a problem that hasn't been solved. all explanations
| around why that is are meaningless compared to real action /
| perceptible change.
| skybrian wrote:
| In part this seems like a denominator issue. Many real Twitter
| users lurk, or post very seldom. Bots probably don't lurk much
| - what would be the point?
|
| If you took the likelihood of a tweet being spam, it's going to
| be much higher than a user being spam, when "users" includes
| the lurkers you rarely see.
|
| For the user experience, what you see is what matters and
| lurkers don't count. But counting lurkers might matter more for
| ad impressions and revenue.
|
| I wonder sometimes if Musk knows this stuff and enjoys playing
| dumb to troll people, or if he really is out of touch. Maybe
| focusing on the user experience is the right move regardless of
| how you get there?
| gwittel wrote:
| The conversation we should be having is where are we now, and
| what is good enough?
|
| Having worked in large scale anti-abuse detection for most of
| my career (~18 years), the points mentioned line up in the
| Twitter thread align with my experience. Scaling in this area
| is hard. 99% efficacy sounds great, until you say 99% out of
| millions/billions. The amount of FNs ('bad' or unwanted things)
| is still substantial enough for users to notice. Taking a 229m
| active user count [1], 99% fake account detection efficacy sets
| you at 2.2m fake accounts. Looking into tweets/day you've
| similarly large numbers if you want to look at content
| detection.
|
| Twitter can most likely do better given the right resources,
| people, and leadership support (Facebook has similar problems
| aligning all 3 of those). Once they have those, the open
| question is how much better they can get. Each incremental
| increase in efficacy gets more expensive.
|
| To top it off, as detection gets better, you think those
| abusing Twitter will sit still? Of course not, they'll change
| tactics (content, usage of hacked accounts, etc.).
|
| [1] Twitter 10-Q 2022-Q1 -
| https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/0...
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| Musk is the largest beneficiary of all the fake accounts
| pumping his follower count.
|
| He basically lives on twitter so he knows everything perfectly.
| He should pay the 54$/share as per the contract he signed.
|
| The stock market crashed and it keeps going down so he wants to
| negotiate a different price, that's all there is to it. Buyer's
| remorse due to deterioration of macroeconomic enviornment.
|
| And the credulity of people believing a billionaire would come
| to save them because he's "not caring about economics at
| all"...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| How do you know they are obviously fake? That's the point the
| CEO is making. From the outside you can't always know. A lot of
| accounts that get fingered as 'obviously' fake aren't, in
| reality.
|
| Edit: I guess I'll add some background here. I worked on anti-
| spam for a few years at Google and basically agree with
| everything Parag is saying here (although we'd disagree about
| many other things!). What he's laying out is spam fighting on
| social networks 101. Stuff that outsiders often latch onto,
| like user name patterns, are ~useless. You need a whole lot of
| signals many of which simply cannot be replicated by outsiders
| to detect spam. For example, one set of signals that Google was
| largely ignoring when I first joined the team was protocol
| deviations. We built an infrastructure to force and detect
| them, which was effective and is still in use.
|
| For some years now I've been writing about the plague of
| academic "research" into Twitter bots that use completely
| invalid methodologies to try and detect spam accounts. There
| are over 11,000 published papers on this topic, which is absurd
| because very close to none of them are sound.
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
|
| Tech talk for those who prefer video:
|
| https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
|
| I'm pleased to see that the idiotic 20% claim is getting
| shredded on another HN thread, perhaps now people are waking up
| to the weakness of these sorts of claims more authors will
| stand up and publicly debunk them. As far as I can tell only
| myself, Florian Gallwitz and Michael Kreil have been pointing
| out the problems with third party Twitter spambot
| investigations in recent years.
|
| Although I'm definitely a Muskian on free speech topics, I
| still feel a lot of sympathy for the spam fighters working at
| Twitter. The extent to which their work is second guessed is
| astounding, the fact that the second guessers are often
| peddling pseudoscience with institutional credentials just
| makes it worse.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yeah. For a community that _constantly_ berates major tech
| companies for FPs in policy enforcement, it is baffling to
| see people say that various users are just obviously spam.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Right? If there's one thing we should _know_ in this
| industry is that unless we have all the facts , we know
| nothing , and even when we do, we still know nothing.
| [deleted]
| aluminum96 wrote:
| Great to see King Musk, the future arbiter of our public
| discourse, responding with a deeply thoughtful poop emoji.
|
| The constant shitposting is exhausting and I wish he would just
| go away for a month (or year...).
|
| Edit -- this is a mean tweet, I know, but it's the truth. You
| can't just respond to a thoughtful thread like that with a poop
| emoji. His plan for Twitter is probably going to be just as
| narcissistic as his tweets.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > The constant shitposting is exhausting and I wish he would
| just go away for a month (or year...).
|
| Outside the US, where there's sanity around the concept of
| money , there is a deep desire for the wealthy to be invisible
| & charitable.
|
| Only in the US you get this sort of phenomenons where rich
| people mount this cult of personality around them and peasants
| trying to impress them in order to get some crumbles.
|
| If you are a billionaire in Switzerland, Germany or France and
| try to do what Trump did or Musk is trying to do...it would
| actually be other rich people who'd ostracize you and distance
| themselves.
|
| Italy too! After Berlusconi they developed antibodies
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are few, if any, billionaires in Europe with the kind
| of assets that US (and Chinese and Indian) billionaires have.
|
| There might be 3 in the top 30 here:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
| hartator wrote:
| He did reply more:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1526250477456965634
|
| At the end of the day if you buy Twitter ads and Twitter is
| getting paid depending on traffic, they have no incentive to
| remove spam accounts.
| blitzar wrote:
| > This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.
|
| Staggering how transparently he is mounting the court defence
| for him to wimp out of this deal, all while maintaining that
| he did everything he could to save the world and twitter.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or
| spam_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397137 - May 2022
| (305 comments)
| tayo42 wrote:
| So weird to see people want to have identitiy requirements to
| post online. I'd prefer to be anonymous, even this account is
| pushing being to attached to my real life identify.
| joshvince wrote:
| The irony of the CEO of twitter presenting information supposed
| to add nuance and context to a debate... using a twitter thread
| where every paragraph is an open invitation to misinterpretation.
| antisthenes wrote:
| The twitter format is not conducive of a nuanced data-based
| discussion and never will be, by design.
|
| Nor is there anything in that thread by CEO that shows us he
| has no incentive to lie and hide behind "personal data not
| accessible to outsiders". But trust us, they're human! You just
| can't check!
|
| It's mind-blowing how anyone can be naive enough to believe
| that, without some sort of personal incentive (e.g. Twitter
| employee or some dir-level whose bonus depends on the buyout)
| rvz wrote:
| > Unfortunately, we don't believe that this specific estimation
| can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both
| public and private information (which we can't share).
| Externally, it's not even possible to know which accounts are
| counted as mDAUs on any given day.
|
| Thank you Parag, for admitting that Twitter needs someone else to
| clean up the bots and spam accounts plaguing the platform. Like
| it or not, it will soon require KYC to get that silly
| verification checkmark at this point and bots that still exist
| there would need to be on a leash, tied to the KYC'd account to
| know who is running it and where it is from.
|
| Don't believe me? YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are already
| ahead with this.
|
| I won't be surprised to see this implemented in Twitter. If they
| don't? Good. Either way, I don't care if they do it or not since
| I never had an account in the first place and by just lurking on
| Twitter, it's apparent that is an infestation of brainless
| parrots not worthy of a sensible conversation anyway.
|
| Someone else can cleanup that mess and if Elon wants to do it,
| fine.
| Jcowell wrote:
| > Thank you Parag, for admitting that Twitter needs someone
| else to clean up the bots and spam accounts plaguing the
| platform.
|
| This made me chuckle a bit. It's like a manger thanking to
| their employees for admitting that a program needs a different
| team to be bug free. As I see it there is only one absolute:
| there are no absolutes.
|
| I honestly don't believe Twitter needs clean up. Rather user
| needs to use the tools at their disposal. Twitter has the best
| user-moderation tools and if it's insufficient I see no reason
| why a third party client is not a sufficient solution.
| blitzar wrote:
| I must use twitter differently to everyone else because I
| don't see the _90% of all twitter is bots and spam_.
|
| My timeline is people I follow; sometimes they retweet
| absolutely demented retarded shit that makes no sense but
| they nevertheless believe in.
|
| _" The algorithm"_ just brings the more engaged stuff from
| people I follow to the top, however, I don't use it because
| while I don't care about someone I follows hot take on thing
| happening right now, I care even less in 2 days time. As far
| as I can tell it hasn't turned me into a socialist / white
| supremacist.
|
| Occasionally I will take a look at "trending" - Yes 90% of
| what is posted is utter garbage, but its not coming from bots
| and spam, its coming from people.
| fatih-erikli wrote:
| only 5 percent is real users IMHO
| antisthenes wrote:
| It's actually completely irrelevant how many there are.
|
| There's no real difference between a spam/bot account and some
| random troll with too much time on their hands who just
| retweets posts from a flame war.
| fullshark wrote:
| Almost no data here, the only new bit of data to me is that he is
| defending a system that classifies "FirstnameBunchOfNumbers" as
| human and not spam. Considering I can buy followers, and twitter
| removes tons of accounts as spam and he admits spammers are
| trying to constantly defeat their detection algorithm, some % of
| those are probably spam I'd guess.
|
| https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/27/buy-twitter-followers/
| duskwuff wrote:
| > he is defending a system that classifies
| "FirstnameBunchOfNumbers" as human and not spam
|
| That's a signal that a user is new or inexperienced, not that
| they're a bot. Twitter uses that pattern when automatically
| generating usernames for new users.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| See timestamp 23:55 in this tech talk:
|
| https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
|
| FirstnameNumbers is the default Twitter username generation
| policy. It doesn't imply it's a spam account.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| I am 100% sure that if the stock market rallies back to March
| levels all this nonsense would disappear and Musk simply buys
| Twitter for the agreed upon price of 54$
|
| Musk is the perfect CEO for our era, this guy doesn't brush his
| teeth unless the stock market gives him a solid round of applause
| accompanied by a 10$ rally in TSLA stock price.
|
| Behind all the boldness and bravado there is a constant need to
| re-assured that his decision is the best decision. Warren Buffett
| on the other hand salivates every time the stock market goes
| down, rooting for it to go down at times so he can buy shares in
| the companies he believes in.
| Clubber wrote:
| Or maybe Musk took the billions set aside for funding to short
| the stock to get the rest of the funding. We don't know what's
| going on behind closed doors. I would assume he knows more
| about investing than you are giving him credit for.
| bayareabadboy wrote:
| But why is spacex private then? And Didn't Tesla and spacex
| almost both go bankrupt in 2008?
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| If the email that came out right after Thanksgiving last year
| was accurate then there is a decent chance that Raptor 2
| engine development might bankrupt SpaceX which makes him
| spending so much on Twitter when his dream is SpaceX / Mars /
| space travel a bit strange.
| etempleton wrote:
| I can believe under 5% of all active accounts on Twitter are spam
| bots.
|
| However, I would bet money that they account for a significantly
| higher percentage of user interactions, particularly ad
| interactions, and most notably link clicks.
|
| If you run an ad on Twitter it will generate an unnatural amount
| of web traffic without much in terms of actual interactions on
| your website. No other digital ad I have run behaves in quite
| this way, which leads me to believe it is almost all bot activity
| and accidental link clicks.
| gsatic wrote:
| It's a tool that enables someone who is too dumb to understand
| how dumb he is, to find the largest group of people on the
| planet, who are dumber than him. And exploit said group.
|
| In the past you needed an army or huge amounts of corporate
| capital to find and exploit large groups of people. Twitter has
| shown you just need to pander.
|
| Such a tool can't be "improved" or "fixed". It needs to be
| shutdown and banned.
| nojito wrote:
| You just described all of social media
| minimaxir wrote:
| Title slightly editorialized to include that it's the Twitter CEO
| as it's contextually relevant and would make the title confusing
| if not present. (particularly as this is a direct rebuttal to
| Elon Musk's claims about bots on the platform)
|
| Elon Musk has responded:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1526246899606601730
|
| > [poop emoji]
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