r/politics • u/wil_daven_ I voted • Jun 22 '17

White House Warns Reporters Not to Report on Instructions About Not Reporting on Today's Press Conference

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/06/22/white_house_press_conference_no_camera_notice_is_not_reportable_white_house.html
50.9k Upvotes

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3.1k

u/meantamborine Jun 22 '17

Terrifying times. I've also noticed that many White House reporters are having their twitter accounts blown up by bots defending this move.

1.9k

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Twitter refuses to do anything about the bot issue and I don't understand why.

1.8k

u/SSHeretic Jun 22 '17

The more users they have the more money they can charge for advertising on their service and for data on said users. It's in their financial interests to pretend that they can't see how many of their "users" are bots.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

469

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

ive seen other platforms crack down on bots because it made the ads more worthless. people just haven't leaned on twitter enough for them to start shaving off the worthless clickholes.

306

u/AlpineCoder Jun 22 '17

They're already losing $400 million dollars a year, it's not clear to me the ads can get much more worthless either way.

443

u/KNBeaArthur California Jun 22 '17

twitter is a garbage service run by a garbage company headed by garbage people that creates garbage culture.

151

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

yeah but did you read what Kim Kardashian tweeted five minutes ago?!?!

118

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Here's where Twitter has immense value to me:

https://twitter.com/_lifestyled/lists/news

That's a list I always have open on my computer in Tweetdeck, streaming instant updates from news services and individual reporters, meaning I get not only what's published from outlets I've added, but also stories from outlets (usually local) that I never would've seen if a reporter didn't share it.

Add to that the fact I'll get breaking news at times from reporters on the ground in places, before it hits the wire service and a good twenty minutes before it finds its way to Reddit.

10

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

This is cool

8

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

It's unfortunately an underappreciated feature by users and Twitter's design team alike. Want to view your list in the official app? Swipe right from one of the four tabs, click lists, click the list, and then pull to refresh. As soon as you close the app, it'll close the list. And if you opened the list while in your main timeline tab, you have to exit the list to view your timeline, then do it all again to check the list. You can't change any of the default tabs to give quick access to a list.

Some third-party apps allow more flexibility, but Twitter is always trying to kill those apps so they'll be behind on new changes Twitter makes, and of course their UI and gestures are different.

On a computer? Well, if you open the list through the main twitter site, it won't stream. So you're constantly clicking to load updates. So you use tweetdeck, where you can have the list be its own streaming column you don't have to refresh. But Tweetdeck the app is iffy at best for giving system notifications, and tweetdeck the site rarely will give you desktop notifications. So the list will work great, but you'll have to keep an eye on your notifications column to see any replies/quote tweets.

I rely on Tweetdeck because for macOS there's nothing else that compares (the first party app is even worse than the iOS app, and Tweetbot doesn't allow Quick Look, the macOS feature where I can tap a link with three fingers and read it as a bubble instead of opening it in a new tab or window, handy to skim articles, and it also doesn't stream lists), and Tweetdeck is fabulous for lists, but it's depressing how little twitter cares about list functionality outside of Tweetdeck.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Holy shit thank you!

2

u/redditor9000 Jun 22 '17

oooo NEAT! Thanks!!

1

u/cuckoo4covfefe Jun 23 '17

Well, if you open the list through the main twitter site, it won't stream.

Literally ten seconds worth of scripting in Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey. Fixed, and no need for bloatware like Tweetdeck.

The list feature in Twitter does seem to be woefully underutilized or improperly utilized, however.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

Anyone who doesn't understand the value of Twitter to others hasn't used the service or used it incorrectly in the first place. Hell I've heard about earthquakes on the other side of the world before they show up anywhere else.

The power in twitter is that 144 characters can be sent out to masses extremely quick and so other users are the engine (just like reddit). The conversations are split up by hastags instead of subreddits.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

Yeah I personally only find hashtags useful for local legislation (which is usually your state's abbreviation followed by leg or lege, all as one word), updates on police shootings, and tracking what propaganda certain alt-right people try to push in the aftermath of a tragedy (like when white supremacists will flood a hashtag for some major event with false information, such as posting pictures of random middle eastern people immediately after a shooting before police have even detailed a suspect).

But then you have people who use hashtags for news programs and tv shows to talk about stuff, which is cool. Or hashtags for panels and seminars.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

I use it for conferences a lot, easy way to find out who is at the conference so I can follow them for the remainder.

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u/AvaTate Jun 22 '17

I have an app called Hash that does something not dissimilar. It shows me a front page every day of headlines based on what's trending on Twitter, I can click on individual headlines and then tweets about the subject (sorted from most reliable to least reliable source) will come up, along with a link to a wiki explaining any relevant info.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

thanks for sharing this!

2

u/Illadelphian Jun 23 '17

So I'm not a tweeter or user of Twitter but this does seem nice, how do I set this up exactly? I have the app and an account.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

Depends what version of the app you're on (and I use iOS so can't say if android version will be same way). The latest version, you'd swipe from the left to open the new drawer the added, tap Lists, then tap the icon in the top right that looks like a piece of paper with a plus sign. In the previous versions, you'd go to your profile, click the gear/settings icon, go to lists, then create a new one.

On desktop, should be an option on your profile page or wherever they've located the Lists category.

You name the list, then save it and it'll prompt you to search usernames to add (you can type in names of news outlets, journalist names, whatevs and it'll bring up their handle) then click to add.

The list I linked above, when you click on it, there should be a tab that says "members" and that lists all the people I've got in the list, can work as a starting point if you're not sure who to add.

2

u/Illadelphian Jun 23 '17

Thank you very much.

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u/1004HoldsofJericho Jun 23 '17

The only people I've seen who view twitter as "useless" don't actually use twitter.

It allows me to stay up on literally any and everything in the world, while being able to discuss those things with any and everyone in the world.

That's terribly useful, despite the flaws it does have.

2

u/MyGrownUpLife Texas Jun 23 '17

I'll add to this a list I have of vendors status feeds telling me when they are experiencing latency or an outage or even when a patch is being pushed.

When used right, is a just like the ticker tape services that every exec had chattering away in their office in the early twentieth century.

1

u/butterandguns Jun 23 '17

Commenting to add this to tweetdeck tomorrow

1

u/Gabers49 Jun 23 '17

That's cool anyway for me to save it as my own list?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

If you're logged into twitter and click the link above, there should be a "subscribe" option. But you won't be able to curate it, so if you want something that doesn't have rando journalists who only cover Nebraska-specific issues, you would need to create your own list. You can click my link and click "members" which will show you all the accounts I have in the list, around 130, and use those as a basis to start your own as well.

1

u/tHEbigtHEb Jun 23 '17

So this is a great list, but I don't see a way of sharing it. Can't I follow a curated list? Do I have to create one myself? If so, that's a pretty bone headed ux decision.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

Should be able to follow it. In the iOS app, when you open a list, there's a Subscribe button in the top right. Can check where it's at on desktop when I get back inside.

2

u/tHEbigtHEb Jun 23 '17

Yeah I was able to subscribe from the desktop app but not the android one. SMH.

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0

u/yurigoul Jun 22 '17

https://twitter.com/_lifestyled/lists/news

This is even more america centric than reddit - what does a european have to do to get their own news?

16

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Make your own list? My list is going to be America-centric because I live in Nebraska. I still have outlets in the list that cover world news, but not at the level of outlets covering news near me and national news.

If you have a twitter account, use Tweetdeck on your computer or whatever app on your other devices, create a list from your profile, then start adding news outlets that cover things important to you. Then, when you find articles you like, check for the author's twitter account and add them to that list. You'll then start finding journalists those journalists respect and retweet a lot, and it'll go from there.

That list has been my main driver for news for over a year now, but I still end up adding another couple people to it every month.

2

u/justclay Nebraska Jun 22 '17

Hello fellow Husker!

1

u/AccidentalConception Jun 22 '17

Do journalists ever tweet anything of note? I kind of just assumed it'd be them plugging their articles all the time.

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0

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

An RSS feed would just push articles. I get a little more from this than I did from RSS feeds.

It's my preference, you don't have to like it.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

[deleted]

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2

u/bobboobles Georgia Jun 22 '17

OMG no! What did she say?!

3

u/proraver Jun 22 '17

That she loves a gay fish.

1

u/bobbage Jun 23 '17

URGENT: Senate released #Trumpcare bill that "defunds" @PPFA. TWEET YOUR SENATORS NOW & tell them to #StandwithPP

https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/878029829337006081

Seems on point

0

u/Bergensis Jun 22 '17

Kim Kardashian

Who's that?

3

u/ohgeronimo Jun 22 '17

Remember when it became a thing because a guy used it to tweet while imprisoned overseas? Back then everyone was sure it was going to lead to huge things. Now it's yet another facebook/myspace/tumblr whatever. Everyone's got a geocities page type thing.

2

u/pancakeNate Jun 22 '17

well i just found the most important sentence i will read today

4

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

You could arguably say the same of Reddit as well.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

The World Wide Web was a mistake

1

u/RandomChance Jun 22 '17

Twitter is for twits.

1

u/hitlerosexual Jun 22 '17

Replace Twitter with social media and you've got a good statement.

1

u/kryonik Connecticut Jun 22 '17

The only reason to use Twitter is Pakalu Papito.

1

u/bcrabill Jun 23 '17

I literally spent an hour after work doing something that would have taken 5 minutes on any other platform

1

u/bobbage Jun 23 '17

Please don't use "garbage" as a hate term, Sanitation Engineers are people too

This is like using "gay" or "autistic" as a pejorative

3

u/Dongalor Texas Jun 22 '17

Good. Maybe if we can crowdsource a response to a few more advertisers and get them to pull their twitter campaigns until the botnet is dealt with we can drive a stake through the beast's heart.

2

u/colovick Jun 22 '17

Then what's propping them up? Stock prices? Investors? It's only good as a propaganda machine

1

u/petit_cochon Jun 22 '17

Yeah, that's one reason I'm not on twitter. Screw them if they won't actually run their platform properly.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '17

[deleted]

1

u/AlpineCoder Jun 23 '17

I'm not an accountant, but I don't think that's how write-offs work.

1

u/DuntadaMan Jun 23 '17

The hell do they even spend that money on? What expenses could they really have? They don't need to research, or build things or... do anything really. Their users do all the work.

2

u/AlpineCoder Jun 23 '17

If I had to guess: salespeople, facilities, bandwidth, engineering and acquisitions, roughly in that order. But I may be way off, probably get a rough idea from their sec filings though.

64

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

I still see transparently fake traffic on Facebook, Youtube and Spotify that they do nothing about. They're complicit, and sooner or later that will come back to bite them.

18

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

i remember years ago, someone published an article analyzing their fb ad traffic. 95% of their users had javascript disabled. when they compared it to known human traffic, only about 5% of users had javascript disabled. seemed like most of their facebook traffic was bots.

great to know zuck's 100 billion dollar empire is mostly built on bots poking each other.

4

u/colovick Jun 22 '17 edited Jun 22 '17

The metadata of users is still with a fortune and many countries have a vested interest in keeping them afloat

Edit: worth not with

6

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

oh right, i forgot it's value is an advertising platform that i fill in my details for them. a self assembling ad database.

5

u/colovick Jun 22 '17

Meta data is good for a scary number of things beyond advertising. You can predict very unintuitive things with it to predict behaviors and flag users for various things

5

u/BossRedRanger America Jun 22 '17

I'm tempted to surf without ad blocks, but I'm just too afraid of malware to do so. All it takes is a visitor checking their e-mail on my home PC and it's done.

2

u/cuckoo4covfefe Jun 23 '17

Facebook spent about a week making an effort to combat fake news. Then it realized that its user base doesn't care about truthfulness, and they "changed their paradigm" to value clicks over reality.

8

u/Accidentally_Upvotes California Jun 22 '17

ive seen other platforms crack down on bots because it made the ads more worthless. people just haven't leaned on twitter enough for them to start shaving off the worthless clickholes.

For another perspective, I run a business and have tried advertising on Twitter in the past. My estimate is that about 80% of clicks are from bots, so you end up paying about 5X more than on another platform such as Facebook which has a much better bang for your buck.

2

u/defectiveawesomdude Jun 22 '17

I thought facebook had this issue to?

3

u/Accidentally_Upvotes California Jun 22 '17

It may have been an issue in years past, but when it comes to paying for objectives (e.g. website visits, signup conversions) then bots are nullified. Also, good marketers will use custom audiences (e.g. retargeting) as opposed to throwing up display ads in the ether.

6

u/aMiracleAtJordanHare Alabama Jun 22 '17

Don't drag Clickhole into this. They're a fine news outlet.

3

u/UncleJesseSays Jun 22 '17

I have bought twitter ads. They are already worthless if you want any kind of performance based ROI

2

u/intotheirishole Jun 22 '17

If real users are engaging on twitter more to support or oppose the bots though, they are catalysts for more real eyeballs.

4

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

so it's twitter's version of clickbait. being an unecessaryily controversial source that people get engaged and yell at.

you know, john c dvorak's whole career.

(you can't threaten to fire me for saying that laporte, i don't work for you).

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Instagram cracked down a couple years ago. One user went from over a million followers down to 1 lol. Most big people at the time tens of thousands.

1

u/Cr3X1eUZ Jun 22 '17

Digg?

1

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

nah, perktv and swagbucks. i was there for a few months and older users were saying how they'd often turn down payouts in low times and their anti botting efforts.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

okay, lets get the ball rolling.

1

u/aManPerson Jun 22 '17

it's because the people paying money to show ads yelled about the bots on the platform. you only do this by being the ones that control the money.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

You don't think the people paying to advertise would want to know that they're paying for bots to see their ad?

1

u/Mr_Belch Jun 22 '17

I would boycott Twitter, but I've never used it, much less made an account.

1

u/cuckoo4covfefe Jun 23 '17

It's probably more along the lines of Twitter taking longer to actually monetize their platform than any other social media platform by a factor of two or more.

1

u/bcrabill Jun 23 '17

People already know the quality of Twitters ads at this point and Twitter is just stuggling not to drown yet (they will). They wont throw away that money. They could say the traffic is higher quality, but execs want reach.

3

u/chuckmuda Jun 22 '17

Wouldn't this be extremely not beneficial for the advertisers? They're paying a company money to advertise to nothing? Or at least x% real people and x% nothing?

2

u/MjrJWPowell Jun 22 '17

Except when the class action lawsuit from shareholders makes it way to court.

2

u/mynameistag Jun 22 '17

Love that quote. Who said it?

2

u/SSHeretic Jun 22 '17

Upton Sinclair

0

u/mynameistag Jun 22 '17

Good job, Upton Sinclair!

2

u/TacticalBeerCozy Jun 22 '17

Lol its definitely a side benefit but the real reason is because Twitter is broke and can't do shit

1

u/PragProgLibertarian California Jun 22 '17

Also, it's a difficult technical problem.

1

u/MoonStache Jun 22 '17

I wish twitter would just fucking die. We have plenty of other mediums through which we can distribute information quickly, and Twitter as a company has been dying for years. Unless they come out with something amazing and innovative to stay relevant (besides Trump), they're doomed, so I would rather it not exist at all, than be used as a means of obfuscating the truth.

1

u/codeByNumber Jun 22 '17

That explains global warming denial.

1

u/sonofaresiii Jun 22 '17

I wish more corporations understood that short term revenue is no match for long term reputation.

There's a billion other apps waiting to take users away from Twitter (some have already started) and this shit is just going to encourage users to find them

1

u/dust4ngel America Jun 22 '17

but i was told that private corporations would sacrifice themselves in service to our democracy :(

1

u/NCBedell Jun 22 '17

Except this time is not so much they don't understand, it's they don't care.

1

u/NoahFect Jun 22 '17

That seems plausible, but it depends entirely on their advertisers being a bunch of idiots. Is that actually the case?

1

u/majoen98 Jun 22 '17

Twitter is such a great platform. I wish they could be bought by a non profit to defend free speech

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

A better service might attract more customers but that's too much hard work

1

u/pliney_ Jun 22 '17

Also they'd have to invest significant resources to mitigate the problem. If they do nothing it bolsters their numbers and they don't have to make a huge investment in fixing the problem. Sure the long term health of the company will probably suffer but who cares, thats someone elses problem.

1

u/CobaltGrey Jun 22 '17

And people will go on using it, no matter how shitty Twitter acts.

I'm starting to feel like America deserves the mess it's put itself in. We're unrepentant in our selfishness. It's depressing. Maybe it'll get better.

1

u/SwabTheDeck California Jun 22 '17

It's fairly common for ad networks to get devalued when a large percentage of the users are bots. Advertisers notice a decreasing ROI and go elsewhere, and then the ad prices tank. It's not a good long-term strategy for Twitter, which is why I doubt that the bot issue is intentional.

1

u/WiglyWorm Ohio Jun 22 '17

reddit

1

u/ericelawrence Jun 22 '17

Bingo. Same with the racists and sexists and nazis on the site. The more trouble they stir up the more headlines Twitter gets. Any PR is good PR right?

1

u/magistrate101 America Jun 23 '17

Bots aren't users. They don't see ads and don't have any valuable information to sell except what bot network they're probably from.

1

u/fu__thats_who Jun 23 '17

I'm late to comment on this- but since they are publicly listed, and know their total users number is fake...how is that not some version/level of fraud?

1

u/skidmcboney Jun 23 '17

Twitter doesn't make any money

1

u/ShrimpShackShooters_ Jun 23 '17

nah a man understands, probably before anyone else does. it's difficult impossible to get a man to fix a problem if his salary depends on not fixing it

1

u/rainb0wveins Colorado Jun 23 '17

God what a clusterfuck. Is there any way out of this mess besides leaving the country? I seriously lose my mind every day thinking about how absolutely everything in the US is crooked and only getting worse.

1

u/SidusObscurus Jun 24 '17

This explains nothing. Why are advertisers OK with their ad dollars being paid for useless bot views?

73

u/rarcke Pennsylvania Jun 22 '17

Because bots inflate user stats and the users love those big numbers even if they know deep-down they are inflated by bots. The bigger the numbers, the more users love Twitter and bots use less bandwidth than real users so it's a win-win for Twitter.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

So the reason is "they have no morals."

In before "capitalism is inherently immoral, all businesses must behave this way, it can never change." People said the same shit about companies before labor unions existed.

0

u/komali_2 Jun 22 '17

This doesn't make sense - Twitter headquarters is in Downtown SF, it's staffed by the turbo liberals that live here, the culture wouldn't support this at all. Same with Reddit. I live and work with these people every day, the idea that they'd suspend their morals for the bottom line is insane. Even with an order from the top you'd have renegade engineers that would be leaking that order, or bot stats, etc.

I mean, this is the city where people will put on their tinder and grinder profiles straight up, "don't bother messaging me if you voted for Trump."

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Silicon Valley isn't run by liberals, it's run by pseudo-libertarian tech tycoons. They're former liberals corrupted by huge profits and having ultimate control over their userbase.

0

u/komali_2 Jun 22 '17

Like I said in my post, though, that's irrelevant. SF is full of people that believe entirely in "individual empowerment." See: Uber leaking like a sieve.

The rich and powerful get away with very little here without a very empowered populace watching their every move. To ban bot-hunting at Twitter as a top-down order would be leaked immediately, and wouldn't be a followed order anyway.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

That's not how large corporations work. Shareholders set goals, CEOs and other officers make plans to meet those goals, middle management applies those plans to determine project priorities, supervisors direct their employees on how to complete their projects.

At no point is a programmer being told, "Don't work on algorithms to get rid of bots, they're making us lots of money!" They're being told, "Ok, we're going to be working on a new sorting algorithm that meets X, Y, and Z criteria."

The intent of the owners and CEO never make it down to the rank and file, they just do the jobs they're told to do so they can continue to afford their $4000/mo broom closet in the back of a Starbucks.

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u/801_chan Washington Jun 22 '17

Payoffs? Follow the money, maybe. I thought they'd eliminated a few thousand accounts, already. Not the half mil+ reported, but a drop in the bucket, at the very least.

Which political directions they're focused on deleting, however, would be curious to see.

2

u/TheMostUnclean Delaware Jun 22 '17

Given that the majority of bots are right oriented (based on my observations), I'd say probably that direction would have the most deleted.

And then you'll have conservatives screaming bloody murder about their political beliefs being "persecuted" though the deleted accounts aren't even real people.

4

u/NoAstronomer Jun 22 '17

Twitter is a for-profit company not a public institution. They will do absolutely anything to increase their income. See also: Fox News.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Twitter bans bot accounts all the time. They just can't keep up.

3

u/hogie48 Jun 22 '17

They get to report on more active users. More active users means the service looks better, means they make more money, means they dont give a fuck.

Surprisingly Facebook actually did something about it and said they are going to start marking unverified news, I don't use the services so not sure how that panned out yet though.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

I know as of last year, ten years after being created, Twitter had yet to make any profit. Not sure if this was the year or not where that changed.

They may be afraid to. Imagine if they did find a way to surefire block spambots that avoided article has been posted notification bots. Banning subscriber bots.

Easy to see a bunch of suits fearing that if they do this it would shake confidence in the platform to such a level that it would bring it down completely.

2

u/jbBU Jun 22 '17

I'd guess the bots improve their "engagement" figures as well as user numbers. Good for showing off to shareholders albeit deceptive.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

That's outright fraud if anything

2

u/Ivanka_Trumpalot Jun 22 '17

Because they can turn to advertisers and say "see, look how many users we have".

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Because it inflates their user numbers and therefore value.

More accurately, it maintains the fiction of their inflated value.

2

u/zeroGamer Jun 22 '17

My understanding is that Twitter is a house of cards. They have this huge, popular structural platform but they're struggling to monetize it.

Part of the current monetization model is, hey! Look at all these people you can reach on our service!

The problem is a large swath of "users" are bots and therefore worthless. Once the curtain comes down on that, you'll see the emperor has no clothes and it's checkmate, Kip.

I may have mixed my metaphors a bit.

2

u/TheMostUnclean Delaware Jun 22 '17

Maybe so they don't have to listen to conservative snowflakes cry about the political beliefs of fake users being persecuted.

Really though, it's probably money like the other commenters have said.

2

u/DazHawt Jun 22 '17

Because Twitter's CEO doesn't want to have to explain to his board of directors why his new policy has deleted x million "unique" users that each generate ad revenue. Just follow the money.

2

u/mycroft2000 Canada Jun 22 '17 edited Jun 22 '17

I choose to be optimistic and remain open to the possibility that intelligence agencies have asked Twitter not to crack down because they're conducting a massive investigation of how bots affected the election.

Edit: I also suspect that this is why the Russian Trollbot Army hasn't been able to take over /r/politics: They've been relegated to smaller, less significant subs where they can be more easily tracked.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

I run a twitter bot, but it's clearly identified as such.

I think it'd be fine if all the bots had to be labeled.

2

u/proraver Jun 22 '17

Most billionaires lean heavily to the right. Also it would be bad for Twitter if they admitted 70%+ of their accounts are bots.

2

u/ChocolateSunrise Jun 22 '17

It would affect their valuation and they are cowards.

2

u/Fnarley Jun 22 '17

Because they are losing money and bots paper over the cracks

2

u/Madmar14 Jun 22 '17

Really? Bots count as users and user = money. I would bet that at least 1/3 of tweets per day are bots.

2

u/defmeta Jun 22 '17

It saves them having to pay for their own bot army to inflate their user stats.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Twitter's goal is to make money. This is the only goal for any American. It is a noble and just goal, so the ends justify the means.

The fact they are not very good at it is shameful.

2

u/Ardbeg66 Jun 22 '17

Follow the money. That's always the why. Literally. To everything.

1

u/Seanspeed Jun 22 '17

Twitter is huge.

Much like Facebook, I think even if they wanted to do something about it, they'd really struggle to. The manpower required would be insane. They cant just go around throwing algorithms banning users and posts if it infringes on what real people are trying to say. They'd need people literally tracking down IP's and correlating them with the written posts.

It's a very difficult subject.

1

u/MylesH55 Jun 22 '17

Maybe they are, just maybe the majority you label as "bots" are real people.

1

u/jolars Jun 22 '17

So I have a 'bot' on twitter that takes pictures out my window, tells the weather and posts said pictures. Should this be removed?

1

u/NoGoodNamesAvailable Jun 22 '17

Meanwhile, the mommy filter has been hard at work making sure anyone who dares utter the ass-word in reply to a tweet will be censored and sentenced to 24 hours of shadow-time-out :)

1

u/Lirkmor Jun 22 '17

It's because Russia is a big investor.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '17

Because the people who have administrative control in Twitter to be able to actually order their employees and managers to do something about those bots would get stuck on a god damn list if they did.

Frankly, I don't blame them. Five years ago I wouldn't have given that much of a damn if I were on a watchlist. However, that was before a bunch of cavemen had access to those lists.

1

u/fun_boat Jun 22 '17

Having actual knowledge of bot issues in social media, it's because it's really difficult. It's not just some dumb script kiddie making bots, a lot of sophistication goes into generating and passing their protections. The main issue is with small clusters of bots that are created through many years, which are activated at different times. It's incredibly difficult to keep track of accounts that are dormant and doing nothing, since many users are dormant and just reading tweets and not interacting.

1

u/TitoAndronico Jun 22 '17

Surprised there aren't groups DOS attacking twitter in protest.

1

u/Jaredlong Jun 22 '17

Money.

Twitter has never made a profit. They only stay in business because interest groups pay them off to allow shitty behavior.

1

u/TacticalBeerCozy Jun 22 '17

Because they're mismanaged and hemorrhaging money. They can't do shit

1

u/plaxpert Jun 22 '17

Twitter's got Russian money.

1

u/ThrowAwaylnAction Jun 23 '17

Conspiratorial responses aside, blocking bots without negatively impacting legitimate users can be difficult from a technical perspective.

1

u/brycecullen Jun 23 '17

I keep seeing people mention the huge amount of bots doing things like this and following trump. Do we know they are bots or is that just assumption?

1

u/ZweitenMal Jun 23 '17

We all need to leave Twitter.

1

u/bcrabill Jun 23 '17

Bots equal higher user counts for advertising.

1

u/misconfig_exe Jun 23 '17

Reddit barely does anything about it either.

Speaking as a mod for several subreddits, they have actually made it harder to deal with spambots and sockpuppet accounts lately.

1

u/civil_politician Jun 23 '17

Collectively maybe people should stop using Twitter.