[HN Gopher] The majority of traffic from X may have been fake du...
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The majority of traffic from X may have been fake during the Super
Bowl
Author : nickthegreek
Score : 126 points
Date : 2024-02-16 20:58 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mashable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mashable.com)
| solardev wrote:
| Isn't it usually fake even when the superbowls aren't
| happening..?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I got a fake AI robocall from Roger Goodell telling me the
| Superbowl was happening a week later, so I missed it!
| solardev wrote:
| I got a similar call telling me the Superbowl was today. I
| watched it, and the 49ers had an amazing victory!! The
| halftime ads for some crypto thing weren't very good though
| :(
| UberFly wrote:
| Does CHEQ publish any kind of public data on this that reports on
| various sites?
| refulgentis wrote:
| The absence of specific information regarding the publication
| of data reports could suggest that the dissemination of
| detailed reports or analyses to the public might not be within
| its standard practice or could be subject to certain
| conditions.
| Nyra wrote:
| Tangentially related but I recently signed up for a Twitter
| account post Elon acquisition and the last step of the process
| requires you to follow one account to start using the site, the
| first option is Elon Musk and everything else is random based on
| your selected interests. Are any numbers on this site not juiced
| at this point?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah, this is reportedly a measure they put in place after he
| bought the company because he was unhappy with engagement on
| his posts. It doesn't exclusively boost him AFAIK.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-el...
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| I get his account in my feed daily despite selecting "Not
| interested" each time.
| travoc wrote:
| MySpace did it first.
| comeonbro wrote:
| M Y P U S S Y I N B I O
|
| I gave Musk a lot of leeway on this for taking over right as
| open-source LLMs started ~passing the turing test, but that they
| can't even stop _this_ is eating most of it.
| refulgentis wrote:
| There's so many weird things about that specific abuse.
|
| The frequency...the inability to stop it after 2 months...
|
| The weirdest thing is they seem to get some special treatment
| that renders them invisible, yet, not prevent them from being
| posted altogether, or have any impact on the account itself.
|
| It's not even particularly productive spam. It's like watching
| someone thumb their noise in front of a steamroller. Makes no
| sense.
| detourdog wrote:
| All of that plus the original intention was to buy twitter
| and stop the bots.
| solardev wrote:
| ...was that really his original intention...
| pavlov wrote:
| "Stop the bots" was a made-up rationale when he wanted out
| of the deal.
|
| The original intention was to buy Twitter so Musk would be
| the most popular man in the world, his comedy would be
| appreciated by a billion followers soon, and as a nice
| bonus they'd buy whatever crypto he decided to pump. The
| Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major business
| decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic.
| solardev wrote:
| > The Twitter buyout was maybe the very last major
| business decision executed entirely on 2021 moon logic.
|
| You know, a part of me hopes he makes it to Mars in my
| lifetime and just proceeds to take over the planet,
| running an alternative society there. Planet Musk: The
| Reality Show(tm) would be quite the thing to watch...
| from 140 million miles away.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I feel like this is how we get a much dumber version of
| the MCR from _The Expanse_. Like, they wouldn 't be
| justifying their weird space fascism as a means to
| terraform Mars, it would all just be one big joke to fuel
| Musk's ego, and somehow a bunch of people end up being
| stupid enough to buy into it.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I was thinking it would be sort of Martian Time Slip,
| only just Elon Musk instead of Ernie Kott all the time.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Lol @ the Twitter purchase being a "jump the shark"
| moment for the gogo COVID era
|
| Lol'ing at its accuracy, and it being obvious once you
| hear it, but something that didn't cross my mind until
| now. Even the constant rolling firings at BigCos: I find
| it hard to believe companies would have cut as quickly
| and aggressively and continually as they did without
| Musk's...housecleaning?...making them look reasonable in
| comparison.
| Karellen wrote:
| > they'd buy whatever crypto [Musk] decided to pump.
|
| For a moment, I'd forgotten that was a thing Musk
| actually did. I got so used to bots _impersonating him_
| pumping cryptocurrencies, my memories had rewritten the
| times he did do it himself into more impersonators doing
| it instead.
| kevingadd wrote:
| To me the weirdest part is that all the bots I see have blue
| checkmarks. How does it make sense for the bot operators to pay
| money to run their bots? Are they using stolen credit cards?
| spamizbad wrote:
| Just the cost of doing business. They make more than enough
| to afford $7/month.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > They make more than enough to afford $7/month.
|
| Sure. But I would expect bot operators to have a vast array
| of accounts. If you have 250,000 accounts and you paid for
| a blue checkmark for 10,000 of those accounts. That would
| be $70,000 per month.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It's more a question on how much they make per account
| though, right? It's either above or below the profit line
| on average. Or they've found a way to reduce costs, like
| stolen cards or owning Twitter (hah).
| cubefox wrote:
| (I think it costs 8, not 7 dollars.)
|
| The surprising thing is that apparently the bot operators
| make more than $8 _per account_ on average, which is
| surprising to me.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's a de facto entry level advertising tier. There are ideas
| and products that spammers believe are profitable to spam at
| that price point.
| cma wrote:
| It let's twitter run fake organic ads without having to tag
| them as ads. A paid account is basically an ad post account
| boost as long as you don't go too hard against the spam
| rules.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| It would be interesting to know how well X detects signups
| with stolen credit cards. If scammers have millions of credit
| cards from data dumps and make a $8 charge on X, what portion
| of the victims would even notice? Even if X receives a fraud
| report and acts decisively to shut down the offending
| account, it might just be an inconvenience to scammers who
| have signed up for many more. At scale, fraudsters could be
| moving a substantial amount of stolen money into X membership
| fees.
| derefr wrote:
| You don't need literal stolen credit cards to dodge CCN
| bans any more. There are so many services today that allow
| you -- without KYC! -- to create an online wallet that is
| assigned a real CCN, and which also don't present as a
| "gift card" on systems like Stripe. You just steal or scam
| people out of _liquid assets_ of any kind (e.g. crypto),
| and you can then turn those into as many virtual credit
| cards as you want -- all under different names, with
| different addresses, etc.
|
| Many of these services also allow spending limits to be set
| on these cards on a per-card basis -- which in practice
| allows the defrauding of any postpaid service, by limiting
| each card to spend just enough for the initial card
| verification, and then denying the actual postpaid charges
| when they come. (Then you close the acct, and open a new
| one with a new name + card.)
|
| To combat this, we've resorted to using grey-market(!) "BIN
| lists" to determine what CCN prefixes (BINs) are used by
| the banks backing these non-KYCed online wallets, and just
| blacklisting all of them. Somehow, I doubt bigcorps are
| doing the same.
| happytiger wrote:
| I think you should seriously consider who can operate bots
| with blue checkmarks for free and your question gets easiky
| answered.
|
| Occams Razor...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The paid blue checks basically created a bot-engagement tier.
| for $8/mo you can protect your account from getting
| banned(profit motive to retain paid checks) AND get your spam
| to the top of every post.
| input_sh wrote:
| AND now you get paid for views, so just have your bot account
| post a random stolen video and spam it under every single
| post that goes anywhere near viral. Boom, easy money.
| mlinhares wrote:
| No one that isn't in the small circle of select chosen is
| paid at all, that is just yet another scam.
| jsheard wrote:
| I saw an account with a $1000 gold checkmark impersonating a
| genuine goldcheck account to promote a crypto scam, that's
| the deluxe spam boosting package.
| stefan_ wrote:
| And they don't even spam! Instead its just endless ChatGPT
| drivel and noise. In a way that's even worse.
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm guessing the white noise GPT posts are to "warm up"
| accounts before they start spamming links, to get around
| spam detection heuristics.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| And at the same time they put streaming API access behind a
| $5000/mo paywall so there's no way for independent
| researchers to easily research/report on botnets,
| astroturfing campaigns etc.
| solardev wrote:
| Man, even that's a scam. All I wanted was cat videos, but it
| keeps showing me undressed humans :(
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe youtube then? I mean, you need your fix, right?
| pfdietz wrote:
| You can get unlimited iterations of hydrogen peroxide ED
| scams.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Mastodon is at least 30 percent cat pictures. The rest is
| moss.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Teases all of them
| labrador wrote:
| Can confirm. I don't have cable so I relied on the "latest" tab
| in X. Almost all the traffic was for sites purporting to be
| showing it live, but weren't because they were some sort of scam.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| You get this for Premier League football games too - hundreds
| of accounts posting "WATCH LIVE!" with hundreds of sketchy
| URLs. In defence of the current owner, it was like this before
| he took over and it's not noticeably worse (from my
| observations - probably is if you do proper analysis, etc.)
| orwin wrote:
| I think it is noticeably worse, because some content is now
| absent (especially cybersec, at least in my timeline).
|
| The only use of twitter i have left is following US sports,
| and i guarantee you it's worse.
|
| Also, i hve the distinct impression that women left the
| platform. I think it was already one of the most masculine
| coded social media, but now with the rebrand (both logo and
| new name) i would be surprised if the number of non-activist
| women on it are really, really low.
| lucidone wrote:
| Every day I get new followers on twitter that are sex bots and
| onlyfans catfishes. Nothing else. Seems like the platform is a
| wasteland.
| latchkey wrote:
| I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the
| letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter
| website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the
| difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real,
| even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is
| still up.
|
| Original: https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader
|
| Fake: https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader
|
| It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to
| automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to
| see if the profile image is the same!?
| labrador wrote:
| I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It
| looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for
| a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a
| lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk
| doesn't care.
| latchkey wrote:
| I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix
| things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to
| 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so
| their salary must be insanely good.
| canadiantim wrote:
| I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure Musk isn't
| personally going through each report to vet them
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I'm struggling to remember a time when Twitter was not a
| wasteland.
| metaphor wrote:
| Sure enough, 17 new bot followers today after blocking 14 only
| a few days ago. There's precisely _zero_ reason any legit
| person should be following my entirely passive, unengaged
| account. Twitter truly is a cesspool.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It's interesting to me how hot and cold descriptions are of
| Twitter. You get posts like these, but then someone chimes in
| about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter
| since Musk took over.
|
| I'm not on Twitter so i can't really make sense of it. I feel
| like i see more negative than positive.. but still.. it's
| bizarre to me that there's people in both camps. More than
| likely some of them are biased.. but still, i find it
| "interesting".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >but then someone chimes in about how much better the
| conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over.
|
| Probably because they like conversing with White
| Supremacists.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| For people with interests or opinions that were heavily
| censored by pre-Musk Twitter, the end of this censorship
| alone compensates for the countless new annoyances.
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and
| continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now
| are in the in group you're happy even tho you were unlikely
| to have been censored
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Is this based on the kind of politics you are into? E.g. if
| you are from US you either have one side or the other where
| one side likes it and the other dislikes it?
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| yeah, i'm having a great time
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > someone chimes in about how much better the
| conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over
|
| I always assume these types of comments are some kind of dog
| whistle
| rsynnott wrote:
| Look, some people _like_ talking to sex-robots, alright?
| Nothing to be ashamed of.
| metalspot wrote:
| > CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the
| entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all
| had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl
| weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306
| million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out
| of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than
| 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96
| percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.
|
| The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok
| 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.
|
| This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product
| masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.
| porphyra wrote:
| Yeah the data seems sketchy but then Elon-haters anxious to see
| X fail will gobble it up as if it were gospel just to satiate
| their confirmation bias.
|
| The truth is probably somewhere in between... there are
| probably actually a lot of bots on X but not nearly as bad as
| this report makes it seem.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| He should just sell twitter and focus on real things. This whole
| saving the town square free speech thing was fun for a bit and
| now everyone knows twitter was never the town square and free
| speech was never a problem. Tesla stocks are tumbling because of
| his bullshit.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I'd imagine that Elon and Twitter would deliberately keep bot
| numbers in their reports to make it seem like the website is
| doing better than ever.
|
| Can Elon / Twitter straight up lie and share fake or misleading
| numbers? Would that be illegal and result in any kind of legal
| action, or are would they be allowed to lie and mislead because
| they're a private company? It's not like these reports would be
| audited by any external sources. Asking genuinely if anyone is
| familiarized with this legal domain.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Being public didn't stop him from lying about Tesla
| information. This would generally be fraud, whether public or
| private, but that is extremely under prosecuted.
| silisili wrote:
| Anyone who has been on Twitter lately could tell you that. Click
| any mildly popular thread, and you get about 25% crypto scams,
| 25% OF, 20% irrelevant clickbait, and maybe 25% at least somewhat
| relevant replies. The other 5% are also bots complaining that the
| replies aren't about the post, odd as that sounds.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I think one limiting factor is the fact that most posts aren't
| particularly deep or insightful, so the intellectual space from
| which one can engage on the subject is pretty limited. So most
| people who engage with content of this sort are just clout
| chasers trying to get attention or scammers.
|
| Is it really surprising that if Elon amplifies some post with a
| single exclamation mark all of the replies will be completely
| inane and full of spam?
|
| Another factor is account size. You can still find interesting
| replies in accounts that are relatively small, especially when
| the author takes time to manually hide spam and scams. But once
| an account goes beyond a certain size they just become a magnet
| for nonsense. It's pure quantity over quality. Elon has the
| biggest number of followers but the quality is abysmal.
| jsheard wrote:
| Ironically discussions tend to be better in circles where
| nobody wants to pay for the blue checkmark on principle,
| because the comments there are still sorted using the old
| ranking system. But as soon as bluechecks start posting they
| get shunted to the top regardless of quality.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| This is just a lead-up to one hell of an election.
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