YouTube has suddenly encountered a rash of “comment reply scam/spam” where if you reply to a famous YouTuber someone with the same profile picture will reply almost instantly with a generic thank you / won a prize type comment and try to get you to use telegram or discord. It’s all so pitiful.
As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it disappeared the moment you changed your “display name” but we can’t have that!
The worst thing is that the workflow to report spam has gotten a lot worse since the last 6 months. Now it takes 9 clicks
1. three dots
2. report spam
3. welcome message start report
4. who is this report for? myself, some specific group, everyone (??)
5. general info (attacked b/c of identity, harassed, spam, ... )
6. how is he doing this? (Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links, +6 more similarly verbose)
7. yes continue
8. submit
9. done
It used to be like 2 or 3 about 6 months ago but I remember after Musk started complaining they responded by somehow making it worse.
Also most of the reports are centered around harassment or racist comments when 90% of the bad content on twitter most people deal with is straight up scams. There should just be a big this is spam button.
My pessimistic view: making it too easy to report spam may highlight how much spam there actually is on Twitter. Something the company definitely does not want to do at the moment.
I wonder if their A/B test showed that this was somehow "solving" the "spam of spam reports" problem. It would be fairy naive but I could envision a world where they tested this out, saw fewer (but more detailed) spam reports and concluded that the prior distribution of spam reports was itself not reliable (e.g overcounted the problem).
This is obviously self-serving but seems like it may at least be a "consistent" world view where they aren't totally cynical.
It's just bad UX and confusing. Consider this question "Who is this report for?". Here are the options:
1. Myself
2. Someone else or a specific group of people
-- This Tweet is directed at or mentions someone else or a specific group of people — like racial or religious groups.
Everyone on Twitter
3. This Tweet isn’t targeting a specific person or group, but it affects everyone on Twitter — like misleading info or sensitive content.
For the same Vitalik spam tweet you see everywhere, I'm guessing 3, but its kind of weird question
Then "Everyone on Twitter is being ..."
1. Attacked because of their identity
2. Slurs, misgendering, racist or sexist stereotypes, encouraging others to harass, sending hateful imagery
Harassed or intimidated with violence
3. Sexual harassment, group harassment, insults or name calling, posting private info, threatening to expose private info, violent event denial, violent threats, celebration of violent acts
4. Spammed
5. Posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages.
Shown content related to or encouraged to self-harm
6. Shown misleading info
7. Offered tips or currency — or encouraged to send them — in a way that’s deceptive or promotes or causes harm
I guess spammed, but I'm pretty sure its a malicious link and misleading, so either 4 or 5 or 6
Then, "How is @... doing this?"
1. Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links
2. Misusing hashtags, such as unrelated hashtags and large number of hashtags
3. Sending a lot of aggressive, unwanted, repetitive or unrelated replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages
4. Fake engagement, such as aggressively Retweeting or buying and selling Likes, replies, or other Twitter features
5. Using multiple accounts to interact or coordinate with other people to manipulate accounts, Tweets, or other Twitter features
6. Following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts so to inflate follower count
7. Something else
I guess its a deceptive link, but I'm not sure because I didn't click on it. I also didn't click 5 on the previous step which was "posting malicious links", I clicked spammed. But he's also using repetitive or unrelated replies so maybe 3 as well? And almost certainly the person running the scam is using multiple accounts.
That's a lot of words to read every time, and I'm pretty sure it has changed since I started reporting stuff regularly.
These questions are the kind of questions you put up when you want to funnel some (or most) of the reports into the trash can.
One thing Twitter certainly has to deal with is hordes of people reporting tweets, even if they're "ok" - I have to believe every single Trump tweet received hundreds if not thousands of reports immediately upon posting.
In the past year I reported many of these. The most common pattern was some WhatsApp number with funny characters. In most cases the message stays there.
I can't believe it's not easy to filter those. Who uses 10 consecutive weird chars in a message of 15 chars? And most of those are numbers.
I stopped reporting because clearly YouTube doesn't care. And there was a more clear case a couple of years ago with inappropriate comments using sexualized emojis. YouTube did nothing until the outrage got to the press. It's like they only focus in finding excuses to demonetize people leaning into wrongthink.
I just got my channel added to an 'alpha' of their new spam prevention algorithm... and it seems to be working so far (fingers crossed).
I was getting around 300 spam replies to comments on my videos per week up until the alpha started—now I'm getting 0. So maybe they finally cracked that nut, but I won't count my chickens before they're hatched.
I still run YT-Spammer-Purge[1] daily, but it's come up dry for the past week now.
I'm also seeing a lot of spam comments pretending to be organic conversation about the market, which eventually leads to you to a "financial advisor" with an oddly unique name that is easy to Google, which leads you to a sketchy website.
> As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it disappeared the moment you changed your “display name” but we can’t have that!
That would be a very smart policy, but twitter is too afraid of inconveniencing psuedojournalist professional hand wringers and their pressing need to update their display names with the emoji that shows they Care about the important issue of the month.
Or to be even more blasphemous, perhaps Twitter should hire humans to review changes to bluechecks' display names.
youtube is a pit of spam in general. Basically any bigger video, every single comment that's even just somewhat high up either has a respond that says something like "check this out <video link>" or "see here <video link>", or a comment left by someone with a username along the lines of "click my profile picture for my pics" with a suggestive avatar
It has gotten so much worst to the point that I wonder if Twitter employees are trying to execute some sort of poison pill so that Musk does not purchase the company, and they can continue to amplify their agendas and squelch opposition.
Cynical me is surprised the "blue checkmark = credibility" thing is starting to crumble. (Actual me can't help smile a bit.)
However, I don't know what they can do here. They set up the system where the users respond to blue checkmarks positively. Adding another layer of blue checkmark is confusing and silly, but having it be gamed is also not good.
The funniest part is that one of these spam accounts actually replied with the same spam facepalm. Lots of replies, all from what seem bot/spam accounts.
The (verified) account bio is "Official Account of the Directorate of School Principals, School Supervisors, and Tendik, Directorate General of GTK, Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology" (translated from Indonesian). It's probably a legit account that got compromised; tweets from a few days ago are all fine (and about Indonesian politics and the like).
So basically, the problem isn't really with the blue checkmark as such; it's useful to verify this is an official government account rather than some random guy; the problem is this account got compromised somehow.
Compromised or not, the blue checkmark is completely meaningless if you can change display names and not have to re-verify your account. Profile pictures I can see allowing for convenience, but what is the blue checkmark supposed to be certifying if not the person's name?
One of the main purposes atm for the verified checkmark is to prevent people from impersonating accounts by using usernames that visually look similar, e.g. @BillClinton vs @BiIIClinton
And reporting "account taken over" is apparently not an option-niece had her account taken over on Instagram and I couldn't report it (the person started trying to get me to add an email to my insta account) as "account taken over" but only as "fraudulent account." Actual social accounts should be able to use ones contacts to verify account take-over and return it to the correct owner.
For the people reporting these things on twitter, there is also "report an account" which is less clicks.
Yeah, I tried to do this today, and there was no option to report it as taken over — super frustrating.
Like maybe if someone's account suddenly has 5+ mutual connections reporting it as "maliciously taken over" you can shadowban it and not have it continue to spam everyone on their friend list? Like it's not that hard.
Make it so that when they change their photo or display name or anything like that, they lose their blue checkmark, or maybe the blue checkmark has like a big question mark over it or something, until they get verified again.
I like this: changing photo/display name puts them in the checkmark verification queue. Also, turnaround time is a minimum of 72 hours. Until then, the previous details are displayed.
The whole "verified person" / "credible account" went out the window years ago when it became a "twitter approved politics" badge. Remember when the drama around 'SJW's were at its height, people started creating obviously fake accounts and spamming the talking points (e.g. #killallmen) to get their accounts verified..
People are outraged at kiwifarms and their users allegedly driving people to suicide, but twitter's "body count" is much higher than probably any other site. Where's the outrage for that??
I'm confused, it sounds like you're asking for more censorship on Twitter, which is not even the subject at hand. Unless you're suggesting bots are killing people.
> As use of the internet has expanded there has been an increasing awareness that online content and activity can cause serious harm to users. There are growing levels of public concern about online content and activity that is lawful but potentially harmful. Whilst harmful content may fall short of amounting to a criminal offence, it can have damaging effects on individuals - creating toxic online environments and negatively impacting a user’s ability to express themself online.
I meant campaigns against twitter for all the abuse they host, and cloudflare for all the other messed up sites they continue to host, like monkey torture videos.
Real humans being caught up in anti-spam measures would be much easier to stomach if there was a sane way to talk to a human at Twitter and get the ban reversed.
How did they get the blue checkmark on Twitter? It is really hard to get one honestly (I applied a few times showing that my "brand" was quoted/linked on Wikipedia and several large media outlets) - unless they are paying several thousands (which I don't think this is the case)
A lot of big name people will add small notes about important announcements to their display names (new book out, stuff like that) so preventing name changes entirely would be very unpopular.
This seems like it ought to be easy to work around. Like, verify a base name, and then give them a little space afterwards where they can add something. The displayed name is the combination of the two. They can even make it a different color to emphasize the announced thing.
Changing the visible display name frequently is a significant part of Twitter culture. In a few weeks, tons of people will change their name to a “spooky” version for Halloween, for example. It’s not a feature Twitter will kill just because of a few scammers.
Brands like to promote products or events in their Twitter bios/titles/avatars, and adding a forced reverify step would add enough friction for them to use Twitter less.
There's a whole crypto scam industry where hackers/scammers will sell accounts they've taken over to folks who immediately start shilling NFTs and pump/dump coins.
The economics of it are interesting, the accounts can be expensive. But it must work out otherwise nobody would do it.
You can just buy one. You're allowed to change your name, profile, picture without losing the blue check. So if you buy (or steal) an existing account you can just update it to whatever you want and keep the check.
People whose opinions I rate post write ideas that I find interesting. I use "Latest Tweets" timeline mostly - only sometimes check "Home" TL. Never follow any Topics or similar - strictly individual accounts. Block or mute annonimous and/or rude/ugly etc liberally.
I see essentially no spam because I don't follow accounts that would spam me or receive a lot of spam replies. The people I follow are interesting. That's about it.
Yeah, exactly, I love learning about geology (esp sedimentation) and maths and medieval history and a bit of philosophy and some software stuff and a little tech business and conservation biology and a lot of various Star Trek accounts and a varying amount of news or political accounts and so on. If someone starts posting too much, I have to unfollow. I block all accounts that show me a sponsored post, and make sure to only do time-based time line. It's excellent content and fast propagation of news. I most often will link into y combinator posts from tweets.
The only spam I've seen is on #hashtag searches, especially #covid19 (with, in 2020 a ton of k-pop spam for some reason) and various crypto folks (with more spam in replying to true believers than sceptics, make of that what you will).
Since you asked... I'm using my account because I'm a meetup organizer, podcast host (well currently on a bit of a longer break) and open source package author.
I find that Twitter and LinkedIn still bring me and my projects visibility. It helps my career (though the ROI might be better on other activities, tbh) and some people joined my team because they knew me from Twitter/my podcast. Every once in a while when I finish a small library or host a meetup event, I publish them on Twitter.
I don't engage in fights, I'm not an activist on the platform and I don't try to "growth-hack" and come up with cheesy threads to boost my profile. When people still try to start some fight on Twitter, I ignore their comment until they forget about it, especially if it comes from people who always stir up controversies. I don't block anyone, but I use the mute button often. I mute if someone posts threads, edgy hot takes and if someone is too political (even if I agree with them).
There are good technical content from many of my follows, but somehow "thread spam" that's designed to inflate engagement numbers still leak into my feed. Political and social activism get into my feed, too. When this happens, I mute, unfollow, click "not interested" etc to keep my feed in an acceptable shape.
I ignore messages asking me to do stuff for them for free, asking me to debug something, etc.
The political commentators that I like, I browse without ever liking or retweeting their stuff.
I feel that this way I get something out of being in these platforms without sacrificing my mental well being.
I use Tweetbot and only follow accounts with interesting tweets and/or friends I've met online or IRL. Having a chronological-only timeline is super helpful in avoiding the toxicity that's so prevalent for 'normal Twitter'.
The few times I hit twitter.com, all I see is a Facebook-like list of popular/highly 'engaging' tweets, and all the interesting stuff I care about is buried somewhere deep in the infinite scroll.
Recently I intentionally got my Twitter account locked (specifically via a tweet insulting Trump Jr. which had gotten my friend's account locked when he posted it originally in response to Trump Jr.) so that I could keep my page (with links to my website and current social media accounts elsewhere) up while denying myself the temptation to ever participate in Twitter again.
My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that stupid "log in" pop-up.
It is the fastest way to surface new information. For example this XKCD actually happened during the 2011 earthquake n Virginia. Folks in PA and NY saw the tweets before they felt it.
The news about the Osama bin Laden raid first broke on Twitter. The news of the Mar-a-Lago raid first broke on Twitter. News of Heartbleed first broke on Twitter.
Every other platform has basically abandoned efforts to compete with Twitter in this area. Reporters are on Twitter because it’s faster than their own news sites. Google piloted a “real time search” product and gave it up.
In addition, I find a lot of hilarious humor content there. It’s amazing what jokes can fit into 280 characters and a couple image or short video files.
I mostly follow scientists and technology minded folks (who don't have anything to sell). Unfollow and block most politics oriented accounts. There are exceptions but for me I often walk away from twitter having learned something substantial.
Best way to get customer service from brands. The CS at TMobile is terrible, for e.g., but their team on Twitter takes care of things properly and swiftly.
I follow musicians/bands that I like to keep up to date on their album releases and touring schedules, people that I think are funny on Twitter to get the occasional good laugh, and some friends whose shitposting and occasional complaining about life I enjoy or sympathize with.
I have a carefully curated list of people I follow and who follow me.
I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech expert, artists, authors, and musicians.
It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but it's definitely worth it to me.
If I'm being honest, I'm on Twitter for the pure schadenfreude of seeing public figures — journalists, celebrities, politicians — get publicly humiliated in real time, usually after saying something inadvertently funny or embarrassing. I'm not proud of it, but it has resulted in some of the funniest content I've ever seen on the internet.
Twitter is excellent for laughing. I barely remember Facebook but even when it was just friends content, it was usually a little more serious or joyful, not witty and entertaining.
I follow people I like to read tweets from. I don’t bother reading replies to the tweets I like. I don’t tweet much. I don’t participate in conversations. That’s it. Twitter is pretty great for me. It is the only social media that I use actually.
I do not write much on Twitter, even less about career. But I think I found you on LinkedIn and added you there. Feel free to ask me about anything you are curious
>Honest question for people who still use Twitter: what keeps you on?
Content. It's the only form of social media I use.
I don't really Tweet, I just consume. Once you follow people who are pros in subjects you enjoy, you can endlessly find content on the subject. No medium can react in real-time like Twitter. Plus, it's super convenient on the phone. As I mentioned in another comment, I hardly even notice any spam.
I filter out the twitter recommendation and vanity system as much as possible, sticking only to carefully chosen follows for things mostly unrelated to politics. I check it a couple of times a week and find it to be a lot more tolerable than before filtering while still allowing me to have an easy way to keep up with people I can't reasonably expect to move to platforms like the fediverse.
I've started using it recently as a software/game dev and its just great place for people to easily and quickly share their content or progress, with lots of interesting things to learn about, I can imagine the same goes in other fields like artists, history buffs, etc.
Though some people are talented they can't help but bring politics into everything, and its just depressing to see the brainrot, I have to unfollow those people or block them sometimes if it's bad enough.
I find Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio for finding interesting things to be roughly the same as that of Hacker News, maybe slightly higher even. There's a lot of things in the frontend and mobile app development world that don't tend to get surfaced around here.
I do make an effort to only follow people I found interesting, and to unfollow uninteresting accounts. Something which you can't really do here, sadly.
I wonder how some of those can be verified accounts at all. They appear to have been hijacked just hours ago, their original content and followers are still there. The rules for Twitter Verification say "Demonstrate your account has a follower count in the top .05% of active accounts located in the same geographic region" yet some of these accounts just have a few hundred followers. Surely 300 followers cannot be in the top .05% of active accounts in, say, Indonesia?
I don't think the follower count being that high is a hard requirement. The sentence in full:
> Follower or Mention Count: If your account is detected to be in the top .05% follower or mention count for your geographic location, it may count towards notability evidence for certain categories.
Emphasis mine.
The other listed sources of "notability" are things like news coverage, IMDB references, and Google Trends. So for example, an elderly state senator who "never quite figured out the socials" would not have millions of followers, but would be eligible for verification because they are notable for other reasons.
The follower count thing seems more like a bolster for influencers and such. They won't have industry references, given that they aren't really in an industry per se, and they won't probably won't end up on the front page of the NYT just for having lots of followers. But nonetheless, it's in the best interest of both the influencer and Twitter to avoid having phonies of the influencer promoting scams.
I have always assumed screen name and badge are just-in-time, reflective of present account settings, modulo caching etc., and not pinned so to speak to their state at the time of a Tweet.
It's got to be the case, or you could just keep flip-flopping and have a dialog with yourself that looked at a glance like an actual interchange (until the account handle was examined)...
I wonder what these strings are. Some sort of an ID? Or maybe to make these tweets sufficiently different from each other to avoid triggering spam detection?
That profile in particular is interesting. The first two tweets appear to be human originated, and date from December 2021. There are no tweets from the account until seven hours ago, and all the tweets after that point are spam.
Several options:
* Spammers creating accounts and posting human posts in advance knowing they'll be used for spam in the future
But the prominence of the issue is. Wheel out a "whistle-blower" or two and Bob's your Uncle.
Forgive me, there are enough cultish Elon worshippers around that I can easily give credence to this theory. In fact, on the balance of probability (given the fanatics and Musks powers), I would say it is actually the most reasonable explanation.
It's really not about Elon Musk cultism. It's about the fact that he was right to question how many Twitter accounts were bots/spam. This is Musk's vindication.
I think this is almost exactly backward: the flagrant, constant spammers using his name and picture, which is absolutely trivial for Twitter to prevent, have been dogging his mentions in great numbers for years.
It eventually pissed him off enough that he figured that buying the company was the only way to solve the problem.
I find the lack of spam filtering tools Twitter provides us to be appalling. "vitalik.eth 50,000 Ethereum give away" is a well known example that keeps appearing from new accounts. I should be able to set filter. Right now I can only hide all content from the account, which keeps changing.
I don't know if it's considered "spam", but another super-annoying thing is when you have to scroll past a whole page of "@downloadbot" or whatever those video-download bots are named. If you want to allow those kinds of things, why are they visible for everyone?
Comically, when I view this tweet in my browser, at the top right in the "Relevant people" box that Twitter wants me to pay attention to and follow is _another_ fake yet verified Vitalik account.
Honest question: what do Twitter's army of engineers and designers actually do every day? The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
Yes, as someone who does international travel and frequently switches phone numbers, dealing with phone-based 2FA """security""" is a major problem for me. At least I will not waste time on their website.
I just never give my phone number out anymore, no matter what because it will be used against me. Even google is trying to hold my account hostage, luckily they have an email forwarding feature so I no longer need to log in.
>and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
Incentives. If the expected value of a single spam message is in the micropennies, then you have to send enormous volumes of them, which can easily be detected by automated tools.
Cryptocurrency changes this. Now an account hack can net the attacker millions of dollars. This means you can send many fewer messages and invest much more time in each of them.
I love it when it suggests people I've blocked. A $32 billion company and they don't realize there's no intersection between people i've blocked and people i want to follow.
>The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
I've probably used Twitter for 1 hour+ per day, every day, for years. I hardly even notice the spam. What am I doing wrong? Is it targeting specific niches? Clearly something is working.
Nor sure why you’re being downvoted, it’s perfectly possible to never encounter this stuff on Twitter. If you encounter tweets by crypto-adjacent people (Elon Musk, etc.) or that mention crypto themes, and view the replies, you’ll easily find spam, but if you don’t do that you might never encounter it.
They're building and A/B testing the new features that blocks you from using the site when you're not logged in, and force you to hand over your phone number if you want to create or use an account.
I've told this story before, but one of my college buddies is an ex-Twitter engineer and I can anecdotally answer this question.
He worked about 2h/day. When he _was_ working, it was on a 5 person team whose sole job that quarter was to implement (from scratch) some JS games and stress relief activities to be played by their content moderation staff in their mandated 10min breaks every 30min.
He was on the team for probably 5 months before he quit and found another job to continue coasting at, and not once in the whole 5 months did their team deliver anything tangible. From what I understood this sort of dynamic was pretty par for the course at Twitter.
I imagine in 50 years companies like Twitter will be used as case studies in business school for how chronically woke-obsessed middle management and career political justice warriors had a measurable tendency to kill otherwise profitable companies in the 2010s-30s. There is just 0 financial justification for the business and management frameworks put forward by these folks, and getting to peer into the Twitter corporate chat, team makeups, hiring processes, and general political climate made it clear to me how much poor money is being spent at many of these companies, and that when the song eventually ends, I'm certainly not hoping to be the one holding the bag.
The vitalik spoofing spam bots are such low hanging fruit. They should really just auto shadow ban anyone using his profile picture besides the real vitalik. (And probably elon musk too..)
I wonder if its an issue of being tangled up in internal bureaucracy, or not wanting to implement one-off solutions to glaring issues that can't be generalized. Certainly a management failure somewhere.
I suspect it's because there are many completely different Twitter "communities". The obvious stuff you see all the time is completely different from the low hanging fruit I'd list off.
I do wish they'd ban blue emojis at the start and end of display names. I see that all the time logged in or logged out.
I've seen impersonation bots that add random noise to the profile picture of the user they're impersonating, so it's possible that Twitter is already doing something like that (just with a similarity threshold too low).
A twitter account I signed up for a while back was immediately followed by someone who claimed to live in the city my zip code falls in and described themself as "a former libtard who saw the light". Followed by the exact posts you would expect, including odd local location name dropping.
273 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadAs for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it disappeared the moment you changed your “display name” but we can’t have that!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqPPWO7kWu4
Just requiring 2FA for checkmarked accounts and an ID confirmation to remove said 2FA would eliminate 90% of the scams already.
1. three dots
2. report spam
3. welcome message start report
4. who is this report for? myself, some specific group, everyone (??)
5. general info (attacked b/c of identity, harassed, spam, ... )
6. how is he doing this? (Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links, +6 more similarly verbose)
7. yes continue
8. submit
9. done
It used to be like 2 or 3 about 6 months ago but I remember after Musk started complaining they responded by somehow making it worse.
Also most of the reports are centered around harassment or racist comments when 90% of the bad content on twitter most people deal with is straight up scams. There should just be a big this is spam button.
This is obviously self-serving but seems like it may at least be a "consistent" world view where they aren't totally cynical.
1. Myself
2. Someone else or a specific group of people
-- This Tweet is directed at or mentions someone else or a specific group of people — like racial or religious groups. Everyone on Twitter
3. This Tweet isn’t targeting a specific person or group, but it affects everyone on Twitter — like misleading info or sensitive content.
For the same Vitalik spam tweet you see everywhere, I'm guessing 3, but its kind of weird question
Then "Everyone on Twitter is being ..."
1. Attacked because of their identity
2. Slurs, misgendering, racist or sexist stereotypes, encouraging others to harass, sending hateful imagery Harassed or intimidated with violence
3. Sexual harassment, group harassment, insults or name calling, posting private info, threatening to expose private info, violent event denial, violent threats, celebration of violent acts
4. Spammed
5. Posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages. Shown content related to or encouraged to self-harm
6. Shown misleading info
7. Offered tips or currency — or encouraged to send them — in a way that’s deceptive or promotes or causes harm
I guess spammed, but I'm pretty sure its a malicious link and misleading, so either 4 or 5 or 6
Then, "How is @... doing this?"
1. Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links
2. Misusing hashtags, such as unrelated hashtags and large number of hashtags
3. Sending a lot of aggressive, unwanted, repetitive or unrelated replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages
4. Fake engagement, such as aggressively Retweeting or buying and selling Likes, replies, or other Twitter features
5. Using multiple accounts to interact or coordinate with other people to manipulate accounts, Tweets, or other Twitter features
6. Following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts so to inflate follower count
7. Something else
I guess its a deceptive link, but I'm not sure because I didn't click on it. I also didn't click 5 on the previous step which was "posting malicious links", I clicked spammed. But he's also using repetitive or unrelated replies so maybe 3 as well? And almost certainly the person running the scam is using multiple accounts.
That's a lot of words to read every time, and I'm pretty sure it has changed since I started reporting stuff regularly.
One thing Twitter certainly has to deal with is hordes of people reporting tweets, even if they're "ok" - I have to believe every single Trump tweet received hundreds if not thousands of reports immediately upon posting.
I can't believe it's not easy to filter those. Who uses 10 consecutive weird chars in a message of 15 chars? And most of those are numbers.
I stopped reporting because clearly YouTube doesn't care. And there was a more clear case a couple of years ago with inappropriate comments using sexualized emojis. YouTube did nothing until the outrage got to the press. It's like they only focus in finding excuses to demonetize people leaning into wrongthink.
Say something “offensive” to the right person, and your account is frozen by the end of the day.
I was getting around 300 spam replies to comments on my videos per week up until the alpha started—now I'm getting 0. So maybe they finally cracked that nut, but I won't count my chickens before they're hatched.
I still run YT-Spammer-Purge[1] daily, but it's come up dry for the past week now.
[1] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
They're so similar to each other that manual rules would suffice to cull them, AI my ass.
That would be a very smart policy, but twitter is too afraid of inconveniencing psuedojournalist professional hand wringers and their pressing need to update their display names with the emoji that shows they Care about the important issue of the month.
Or to be even more blasphemous, perhaps Twitter should hire humans to review changes to bluechecks' display names.
You're welcome Twitter, no need to thank or pay me (unless you want to of course!)
However, I don't know what they can do here. They set up the system where the users respond to blue checkmarks positively. Adding another layer of blue checkmark is confusing and silly, but having it be gamed is also not good.
The (verified) account bio is "Official Account of the Directorate of School Principals, School Supervisors, and Tendik, Directorate General of GTK, Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology" (translated from Indonesian). It's probably a legit account that got compromised; tweets from a few days ago are all fine (and about Indonesian politics and the like).
So basically, the problem isn't really with the blue checkmark as such; it's useful to verify this is an official government account rather than some random guy; the problem is this account got compromised somehow.
For the people reporting these things on twitter, there is also "report an account" which is less clicks.
Like maybe if someone's account suddenly has 5+ mutual connections reporting it as "maliciously taken over" you can shadowban it and not have it continue to spam everyone on their friend list? Like it's not that hard.
The statement works just as well without it.
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137
> As use of the internet has expanded there has been an increasing awareness that online content and activity can cause serious harm to users. There are growing levels of public concern about online content and activity that is lawful but potentially harmful. Whilst harmful content may fall short of amounting to a criminal offence, it can have damaging effects on individuals - creating toxic online environments and negatively impacting a user’s ability to express themself online.
Moderation will never be perfect, and IMO it's better to err on the false negative side
The economics of it are interesting, the accounts can be expensive. But it must work out otherwise nobody would do it.
See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32662123
(edit: that was instagram, but its probably the same idea..)
I deleted my account half a decade ago and haven't missed it.
The only spam I've seen is on #hashtag searches, especially #covid19 (with, in 2020 a ton of k-pop spam for some reason) and various crypto folks (with more spam in replying to true believers than sceptics, make of that what you will).
I find that Twitter and LinkedIn still bring me and my projects visibility. It helps my career (though the ROI might be better on other activities, tbh) and some people joined my team because they knew me from Twitter/my podcast. Every once in a while when I finish a small library or host a meetup event, I publish them on Twitter.
I don't engage in fights, I'm not an activist on the platform and I don't try to "growth-hack" and come up with cheesy threads to boost my profile. When people still try to start some fight on Twitter, I ignore their comment until they forget about it, especially if it comes from people who always stir up controversies. I don't block anyone, but I use the mute button often. I mute if someone posts threads, edgy hot takes and if someone is too political (even if I agree with them).
There are good technical content from many of my follows, but somehow "thread spam" that's designed to inflate engagement numbers still leak into my feed. Political and social activism get into my feed, too. When this happens, I mute, unfollow, click "not interested" etc to keep my feed in an acceptable shape.
I ignore messages asking me to do stuff for them for free, asking me to debug something, etc.
The political commentators that I like, I browse without ever liking or retweeting their stuff.
I feel that this way I get something out of being in these platforms without sacrificing my mental well being.
The few times I hit twitter.com, all I see is a Facebook-like list of popular/highly 'engaging' tweets, and all the interesting stuff I care about is buried somewhere deep in the infinite scroll.
My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that stupid "log in" pop-up.
https://xkcd.com/723/
The news about the Osama bin Laden raid first broke on Twitter. The news of the Mar-a-Lago raid first broke on Twitter. News of Heartbleed first broke on Twitter.
Every other platform has basically abandoned efforts to compete with Twitter in this area. Reporters are on Twitter because it’s faster than their own news sites. Google piloted a “real time search” product and gave it up.
In addition, I find a lot of hilarious humor content there. It’s amazing what jokes can fit into 280 characters and a couple image or short video files.
I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech expert, artists, authors, and musicians.
It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but it's definitely worth it to me.
- There's a lot of really funny posts
- Anything notable that happens on other platforms will make its way there pretty quickly
Content. It's the only form of social media I use.
I don't really Tweet, I just consume. Once you follow people who are pros in subjects you enjoy, you can endlessly find content on the subject. No medium can react in real-time like Twitter. Plus, it's super convenient on the phone. As I mentioned in another comment, I hardly even notice any spam.
Though some people are talented they can't help but bring politics into everything, and its just depressing to see the brainrot, I have to unfollow those people or block them sometimes if it's bad enough.
I do make an effort to only follow people I found interesting, and to unfollow uninteresting accounts. Something which you can't really do here, sadly.
https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Averified%20%22giving%2...
Edit: The best one so far, replying to @POTUS: https://twitter.com/IYCKarnataka/status/1570126180791242753
> Follower or Mention Count: If your account is detected to be in the top .05% follower or mention count for your geographic location, it may count towards notability evidence for certain categories.
Emphasis mine.
The other listed sources of "notability" are things like news coverage, IMDB references, and Google Trends. So for example, an elderly state senator who "never quite figured out the socials" would not have millions of followers, but would be eligible for verification because they are notable for other reasons.
The follower count thing seems more like a bolster for influencers and such. They won't have industry references, given that they aren't really in an industry per se, and they won't probably won't end up on the front page of the NYT just for having lots of followers. But nonetheless, it's in the best interest of both the influencer and Twitter to avoid having phonies of the influencer promoting scams.
I have always assumed screen name and badge are just-in-time, reflective of present account settings, modulo caching etc., and not pinned so to speak to their state at the time of a Tweet.
It's got to be the case, or you could just keep flip-flopping and have a dialog with yourself that looked at a glance like an actual interchange (until the account handle was examined)...
(Didn't end up implementing; easier to abandon the platform altogether and deny anything purportedly attributable to me.)
Several options:
* Spammers creating accounts and posting human posts in advance knowing they'll be used for spam in the future
* Account sold by the actual owner
* Account compromised and repurposed for spamming
Forgive me, there are enough cultish Elon worshippers around that I can easily give credence to this theory. In fact, on the balance of probability (given the fanatics and Musks powers), I would say it is actually the most reasonable explanation.
It eventually pissed him off enough that he figured that buying the company was the only way to solve the problem.
He might be right about that.
How to use advanced muting options
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...
Twitter's claim was always about monetization accuracy: that <10% of ad impressions are shown to bots.
For as much as everyone complains about Twitter, there is obviously value in the product.
Honest question: what do Twitter's army of engineers and designers actually do every day? The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
They work on more dark patterns to force you to give your phone number or to create an account to read a tweet.
I just never give my phone number out anymore, no matter what because it will be used against me. Even google is trying to hold my account hostage, luckily they have an email forwarding feature so I no longer need to log in.
Incentives. If the expected value of a single spam message is in the micropennies, then you have to send enormous volumes of them, which can easily be detected by automated tools.
Cryptocurrency changes this. Now an account hack can net the attacker millions of dollars. This means you can send many fewer messages and invest much more time in each of them.
I still do, but I used to, too.
I've probably used Twitter for 1 hour+ per day, every day, for years. I hardly even notice the spam. What am I doing wrong? Is it targeting specific niches? Clearly something is working.
Like this https://twitter.com/mdj7282/status/1563203203490992128
He worked about 2h/day. When he _was_ working, it was on a 5 person team whose sole job that quarter was to implement (from scratch) some JS games and stress relief activities to be played by their content moderation staff in their mandated 10min breaks every 30min.
He was on the team for probably 5 months before he quit and found another job to continue coasting at, and not once in the whole 5 months did their team deliver anything tangible. From what I understood this sort of dynamic was pretty par for the course at Twitter.
I imagine in 50 years companies like Twitter will be used as case studies in business school for how chronically woke-obsessed middle management and career political justice warriors had a measurable tendency to kill otherwise profitable companies in the 2010s-30s. There is just 0 financial justification for the business and management frameworks put forward by these folks, and getting to peer into the Twitter corporate chat, team makeups, hiring processes, and general political climate made it clear to me how much poor money is being spent at many of these companies, and that when the song eventually ends, I'm certainly not hoping to be the one holding the bag.
I wonder if its an issue of being tangled up in internal bureaucracy, or not wanting to implement one-off solutions to glaring issues that can't be generalized. Certainly a management failure somewhere.
I do wish they'd ban blue emojis at the start and end of display names. I see that all the time logged in or logged out.
It was not a great start.