Suspicions were aroused after researchers found a third of the accounts under investigation to have been created within minutes of each other. They exclusively promoted UK-based PRC diplomats, ignoring those in other countries.
So human researchers were able to spot a pretty obvious pattern. How come Twitter's own staff and algorithms never seem to catch on, despite having even more data to look at?
Someone on HN (can't find the ref) once speculated that Twitter has an incentive not to shut down the fake accounts because the fakes boosts user numbers and "engagement" which correlate with profit. Twitter is certainly making a lot: I once looked into running a Twitter ad campaign for my business until I saw projected $2+ clicks. Are the massive margins suggested by those CPCs built on the backs of fake accounts?
Well yeah, what we see as obvious bots, twitter sees as MAUs which it can include in figures given to investors and shareholders.
Because they haven't developed any systems to identify the bots, they can pretend that they do not know they are bots - and their active user figures are not fraudulent/illegal. If they identified the bots, then they would not be able to lie about these accounts.
If they blocked chinas bots they would also block the follow, like, spam and click fraud bots. Removing 50% of twitters traffic would be hard to justify to higher ups, you could argue that the robots just produce noise and lower the quality of the product but higher ups just want to see the numbers get bigger.
I know I’ve had that thought here but I’m sure I’m not alone. The incentives are perverse, and moreover it explains why the Apple App Store and Amazon are populated with fake reviews and general chaff.
The fakers are parasitic to the buyer but symbiotic to the seller.
Twitter will not actively remove bots and fake accounts because without the new bots their user base has been stagnant for years and probably declining really fast.
I remember some years ago I would get messages from Twitter bots that all had an overly sexualized picture, and were named a womans name and then some random digits. It was so obvious that I don't understand why Twitter didn't stop it.
It's similar to the problem of security holes. Defenders have to find all bugs. Attackers have to find a single bug that the defenders missed. Twitter has to find all bots. These researchers have to find a single (cluster of) bot that Twitter missed. It's a lot easier.
From big co's understanding point of view, I think a more sensible option would be that Twitter doesn't look at it, or even cares, as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
I don't think Twitter allows it maliciously, as it tends to hurt their PR every time, and paints a target on their back for governments to attack them.
Wake me when they're meaningfully hurt and/or attacked. Until then, they will continue to do these things intentionally (which they do), whether the intent is malice or a political agenda.
A fraction of the population of the UK are on twitter, but it is used to drive media narratives.
I'm skeptical, as it feels like the narratives are more to do with they are cheap to write about, rather than meaningful journalism.
For example, after black players missed penalties in the Euros, there was wall-to-wall coverage on the BBC about racist comments directed at the players on twitter, provoking discussion on how racist the UK was.
Not until later, however, did people find that many of the tweets were sent from outside the UK.
It would indeed be great if reporters were somehow immune to the pressure to constantly churn out stories to compete with the algorithm's recency bias, 24 hour news networks, pseudo-news outrage channels and the like.
Maybe if we would limit the number of time a news outlet could publish to once or at most twice perday, then we could have all stories spell, grammar, and fact checked by a editor. Then all of the stories compiled and even printed. It would allow journalist to properly research and not be under to write something just so that they have it out minutes before the competition.
That reminds me of a recent case where an Irish teenager had charges brought against him for using Twitter to send hateful racist messages to a former English footballer. The abuser (sensibly) pleaded guilty and avoided a criminal conviction.
It's not a statistic, rather it's an idiom, meaning "a small part of".
If US statistics are anything to go by, then it will be 10pc of those 17 million, sending 80pc of tweets, so the media is primarily focusing on what a very vocal 2.5pc are thinking.
This is absurd. 26 accounts? 70 accounts? This is script kiddie level.
You can buy accounts for pennies(literally) linked to @outlook.com on blackhat marketing websites. You can also buy the tools to administer all of them.
£500 (estimate) would get you from black hat marketeers:
- 200 twitter accounts (new) - you can also get aged ones but more expensive
- bot
- around 25-100 proxies to rotate when posting (depending on quality 25 would suffice)
> We removed 38 Facebook accounts, 76 Pages, and 55 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.
In RL you'd be able to catch and identify the thief. Digital... a bit different I'm afraid. Online - you'll struggle to prove with 100% certainty who did it. Anything else apart from proof is propaganda/assumptions. Not facts.
What makes you think those accounts were really from China and not from Australia, Taiwan or even Iran? Anyone can do it with a tiny botnet/a few ssh's into consumer routers or by buying less popular browser addons.
My point was this is not news worthy by any measure. It's just bashing for the sake of bashing.
If you want to make it news worthy, tell me you indentified 1k or 2 of aged twitter accounts that spwe propaganda. Not 1 week accounts.
I wonder if there is even nation state that can't afford it. Knowing North Korean capabilities they too probably can. And I can't think anyone who would me more limited.
True if you are too poor to build an ai and tools to spam your propaganda like the west does you could always just higher a few locals at $1 a week for better results.
ya. At 26-70 accounts you don't even need a VPS, there are free VPNs, free temporary emails, and temporary phone numbers you can buy. this could be any angry chinese person or a teenager.
Being anti-china gets people riled up. I'm guessing it's the same in China when they want to divert the attention.
50 western accounts on <chinese-social-media-site> said 'China Bad' at the same time.
At this point, I truly believe (despite this can sound utterly obvious) that social networks are not just products for "entertaining" the masses (In reality is just a honey pot for gathering your data, make a consumer profile out of your interactions and sell stuff to you later roughly speaking). I mean, it might be the case that initially were conceived strictly for this purpose, but the side effect is that it also provides with a huge vector for spreading propaganda and manipulation, not only by local actors, but also for foreign countries. Basically is a direct communication channel with the vast majority of citizens from a region. So, maybe with the right amount of persuasion ,good strategy and time, external governments can be destabilized.
Supposedly, it's good for security discussions. I've tried and in reality whilst some signal is there the noise is just overwhelming. Even with curation, almost 100% of the traffic was unrelated personal conflicts.
Hopefully in a few years' we'll rediscover the personal/professional separation.
Not to mention politics. Yes security guys on Twitter, we get it, you're all very progressive. Can you talk about bloody computer security for a change?
I am convinced that twitter is the worst thing to happen to dialog in western society in the last 20 years. No subject of any depth can be adequately examined in 280 characters or less. All nuance is lost, politician try and write for quick viral sound bites rather than reasoned argument.
can you imagine Thomas Paine trying to write Common Sense in 250 charcters, or if Adam Smith or Karl Marx tried to optimize their writting to maximize how viral quotes would be for pwn'ing their opponents
>A University of Oxford report shows 98,000 tweets were connected with a Chinese program spreading the propaganda statements of Beijing’s ambassador in London.
There's a distinction for us too, but I think it's well applied here. They're falsely presenting themselves as British citizens, (if that doesn't make sense to you, perhaps think 'falsifying a document'?) but they are 'real' (as opposed to fake) accounts, that are really pro-China/CCP.
Note the article does also brand it a 'fake band of PRC groupies' (which per above I would consider wrong - they are a band of 'PRC groupies' - but if 'fake's what you want, it's used too).
While it may have more resources, state level actors are just as prone to a low level worker wanting to just get it over with so they can go home as any other large bureaucracy. Sure some plans are tripple vetted and done with extreme care, but sometimes someone just says at 4PM on a Friday “Hey Carl, can we get a few bots on these tweets?”
That said, I also wouldn’t say that just because it came out of China it has to be the government at work anyway. Plenty of small bot groups get made by a person who really cares about X thing, and there are plenty of super patriotic Chinese citizens on the Chinese web.
> We identify a large network of Twitter accounts that
demonstrate multiple forms of coordinated inauthentic
activity. The network consists of 62 accounts in total, 29 of
which were recently active until we flagged their activity for
Twitter.
Even the 62 accounts? That is like nothing, I would expect single person to manage half of that in a day with efficient tools.
Why are these numbers always so laughable like all the press of Russian spending couple tens of thousand on advertising, when in general speding was in billions.
I wonder how many pro-DNC troll accounts there are too, and why those aren't tracked in like?
It's just sockpuppeting at scale, although I'm not sure of the real difference between paying 100 people to post similar stuff, and paying 1 person to run 100 accounts. Every large organization that wants to manipulate opinion does this, and the only distinction between the former and the latter is that paying 100 people requires a lot of money.
No GFW if you're working in propaganda apparently.
This way they could claim on twitter how it was "business as usual" for the Chinese embassy on Kabul during the Taliban invasion. Information clearly not directed to its alleged audience.
Though yes, it should be on Twitter and FB to detect and control those bot accounts.
I’ve been accused of being 50c army for expressing a more neutral tone on China and challenging pro-US anti-China rhetoric.
It’s actually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about China, Chinese economy, Chinese government, or Xijinping because those seperate things are all conflated into a single one.
Where as if you try to conflate, Biden (or trump) with US economy, america or the america people you will quickly get torn down as being ridiculous for the conflation.
Isn't that a cultural thing with China, though? That the party is the state, and therefore any criticism of the party is anti-patriotic criticism of the country?
Thailand has similar rules; criticising the king is illegal because anti-patriotic. Cambodia has rules around criticising the government (conflating it with criticising the country). Myanmar is a bit of a special case at the moment. Not sure about Laos or Vietnam.
The culture there just doesn't allow that kind of expression: you can't criticise your boss, or any authority, in public. That has become a flat "you can't criticise the CCP or its policies without being seen as attacking China" online.
It doesn't seem like you're consciously doing it but this comment falls to the exact same fallacy. That is, the party and their enforcers would be happy to agree.
Yes, there's a very noisy mainority both online and abroad that will make you believe so.
It's far from representative of the culture(s) and views of people in China, though.
I spent a couple of years in SE Asia, and worked in Cambodia, and my comment is based on that experience. I had a fascinating conversation with one of my staff where she explained that to criticise one's boss was absolutely taboo. Roughly equivalent to taking a dump on your boss's desk in Western culture.
There's this whole concept of "social harmony" that we don't have in the West. And partly it revolves around respecting your place in a very strict social hierarchy. Criticising those above you in the hierarchy is "disharmonious" and not accepted.
I'm fascinated if you know this is different in China? I haven't been to China (yet). But my impression from the contact with the Chinese I have had is that (at least in this respect) the cultures are very similar.
There are party elites. There are also a huge number of private enterprise that are not politically involved at all. They are there to make money, or impact.
You are right about the social harmony aspect, but the younger generations interpret that as “don’t interfere with gov” … they won’t publically criticise or do any kind of political activism. But that still leaves a whole lot of things they do do.
yeah, same in Cambodia. Most people I talked to didn't really seem to care about the politics, and are much more interested in making money. As long as the government let them do that relatively unrestricted, then they observed social harmony and kept out of politics.
It's everywhere. And especially on the dumbest shit like Imgur or some subreddits. Just literally "Fuck China" trains. And clearly, they are the free, independent, smart, non-sheep people eh
> China, Chinese economy, Chinese government, or Xijinping because those seperate things are all conflated into a single one
Ehm...you are aware that you're talking about a one-party state? I used to live in one; it was all the same thing (except for the Xi Jinping part, of course).
No it isn’t. The tech scene in China is awesome. The startup scene is awesome. The communities I have interacted with are all awesome.
Yes political speech isn’t really a thing. Yes xi is a problem. But to miss the awesome because of that is a mistake in my opinion.
Small enterprises are largely uneffected by government. Sure Tencent and Alinaba have to jump through government hoops… but there is A LOT of business underneath that. Doing awesome stuff.
> The tech scene in China is awesome. The startup scene is awesome. The communities I have interacted with are all awesome.
I could say the same things about my country of birth at the time when the things I said were all true. I never said that no communities can thrive under oppressive conditions.
I think it takes more imagination to pretend we're not already there.
It doesn't take much money to convince people to do awful things for you online. You certainly don't need nation-state levels of cash to push your opinions in front of a lot of eyeballs.
I suspect Twitter/FB/etc all know about what they're being used for, but per other comments, this is all positive KPI for their investors.
UK universities are full of Chinese students. In Oxford, there are entire student accomodation blocks that seem to contain only Chinese students.
It's possible, but unlikely, that these students are opponents of the PRC government. They will mostly be privately funded; which means they will be from families that have done well from the PRC.
Oxford has its own Confucius Institute of course (known as a China Centre) of which they are likely to be members of. The PRC uses these organisations to keep tabs on the overseas PRC students and make sure they're not stepping out of line. ;)
No because as long as two sites exist, a malicious actor can cross them over.
Alice thinks she's posting to a Mongolian basket weaving forum, and as such she solves a captcha-type proof, and her post appears, so all seems well to her.
Actually that captcha-type proof came from Mal-the-Malicious-One who is trying to influence opinion by posting political stuff on a Japanese Anime forum. His political masters fund both Mal and the Mongolian basket weaving forum. Given modern tech it doesn't cost much of anything to fund a small.. or even large.. forum.
Alice incorrectly thought she was performing a proof to post on a Mongolian basket weaving forum but she was actually performing a proof to post someone else's political content on someone else's Japanese Anime forum.
Interesting meta question: Who wins and who loses? Clearly, the people ignoring political content win because they got someone else to pay for their Mongolian basket weaving forum. Mal-the-Malicious wins because he's got a job. The owners of the Japanese Anime forum win because they "got more clicks" so the ad revenue pours in. The people paying for this win because their political spam got posted. The only losers in this are the general public whom are getting political spam cluttering up their Japanese Anime forum. But they've got nowhere to turn because everywhere is clogged with spam, and they're paying $0 for the service and the forum, being more wealthy, can afford better features. People who are not gullible are not hurt by the political spam. Only dumb/gullible people are hurt by the political spam.
So its one of those eugenic slash tragedy of the commons type of scenarios, at least WRT who loses.
Eventually in the long run there is systemic collapse. Certainly, "reviews" on the internet are now useless and I generally ignore them, and once everyone does that, "reviews" as a system will go away. Comments on propaganda outlets were turned off a long time ago, plenty of publishers who don't allow comments anymore... Eventually if all the comments on the internet are either spam or hyper censored, nobody will bother to read comments on the internet, so it'll go away.
Without commenting on China specifically, a few facts:
- The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections
- Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself.
- Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying can "buy" hundreds of millions in corrupt (but usually legal) profits.
- The checks-and-balances put in 250 years ago aren't adequate to defend democracy.
As a footnote: The second-cheapest way is through asymmetric attacks, such as cyberattacks, and increasingly, bioattacks. I don't want a debate about COVID19 origins, vaccines, or what-not (please don't), but the fact of the matter is that engineering a virus like COVID19 is within the grasp of most nation-states. That vulnerability went from theoretical to very, very visible. Genetic engineering will only get better. It's not implausible that soon we'll be able to engineer viruses which lead to long-term disability, decrease the IQ of a nation, or are at least somewhat selective by ethnicity (of course, once released, all bets are off). It's definitely possible to have vaccine-in-hand when releasing a bioweapon.
You are right about your points, except that I think even with a vacine in hand you risk too much with an effective bioweapon, and you will look guilty as fuck if you somehow have a vacine in time (with sufficient production) and the rest of the world does not.
I do wonder (and I am not proposing anything here), that without the gatekeepers and with the industrialized spread of information on the internet, that we have reached a point where we can no longer have freedom of speech, simply because it makes it too easy to spread things. Are we forced to got into "information lockdown", and if so what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?
Whether a relatively paltry (harmless compared to conventional bioweapons) virus like COVID was ever considered as a weapon hardly matters at this point. What really scares the absolute poop out of me is that the west has shown its hand, and exposed stress fractures that could easily be exploited by foreign actors.
I'd say that the lines between what you have delineated as first and second cheapest attacks are obscure. Cyber/bio/etc attacks are now a means of accomplishing "informational" attacks.
Perhaps I've been deceived by traditional and social media and the scale of antivax, QAnon, MAGA movements are blown out of proportion, but if a foreign actor ever wanted to deliver a significant blow to the west, it would be to influence and exploitation of theses movements in very slow and deliberate ways. Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.
(It's not just the antivax/QAnon/MAGA movements that scare me either. In my opinion, anti-American whataboutist/hyper-socialist/pro-communist are just as concerning.)
Maybe this is already the case. Then again I might be no less paranoid than the followers of these movements.
I know I'm not the first to point this out and I'm only regurgitating what has already been stated, but I only see a few ways this will/can unfold. The west will...
- become more authoritarian to deal with the civilly insubordinate
- descend into chaos and anarchy as influence dwindles
- i dunno...
While western military defense remains unassailable, there is a huge gaping hole in its ability to deter non-conventionial aggression and encroachment.
That's an interesting hypothesis: The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.
> The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon
Not what I was saying, so apologies if that's how it reads. I'm saying very passive "bioweapons" could be used to cause stress, increase societal friction, disrupt normality, etc over extended periods of time... effectively destabilizing societies from within, causing governments to take their eyes off the ball, letting down their guard, etc...
What's interesting is that the government (forget which department and paper) did have a plan. They had accounted for this scenario. But I guess there's a chasm between having a plan and being able to put it into practice.
Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.
> Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.
There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.
In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.
China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.
Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.
Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. The most obvious counterexample is that the foreign state actors (not China but others) could successfully suborn and control several of these niches, and steer the groupthink of these groups in a direction favourable to themselves: Most obviously the take-over of the NRA in 2015 and the successful influence campaign on the "gun nut" niche by the Russian state; but there are countless other examples.
Impressive headline wording where the concept of borders simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist so people can feel fearful of their home lives being threatened and also fearful because it’s a scary other doing it from so far away. “Invade” lol
> The tweeters, it was discovered, appeared to be part of a fake band of PRC groupies. Impersonating British citizens, they exist solely to manipulate public opinion, and push the views of prominent UK-based PRC representatives, by parroting their stirring political propaganda in tweets and re-tweets.
A genuine account belongs to a real person who isn't participating on a platform solely for the purpose of astroturfing.
The study in question had its own criteria. However in my experience, I'm not sure if it is important to distinguish between someone who "brought his own rations" or is a bonafide member of the 50 cent army.
Toxic nationalism, shifting premises, constant deflection and whattaboutism are all present. Typically the troll in question will claim to be a native speaker of a language they have a poor understanding of. Taken all together, the presentation exceeds credulity. If nothing else the end result paints the narrative in a light of inept desperation.
The issue isn't necessarily with the content of the message, but the ineptitude of the deception. There's a special delight similar to obliging a telephone scammer who has a poor command of language and an absurd pitch.
Does this really do any harm? Sure, it may spread the positions of Chinese diplomats more broadly than they would naturally be shared, but it doesn't change the ability and responsibility of readers to evaluate the truth and value of what they read. We act like people are incapable of thinking for themselves, like they must at all costs be prevented from seeing something that might be untrue or not to their benefit.
~60 accounts. TBH, another weak sauce, script kiddie tier effort comparable to other exposed PRC social media networks from the past couple years. Getting pretty incredulous that western researchers have only managed to uncover these these low-effort campaigns far below the competency of a state actor with PRC resources. Either PRC is still that incompetent at manipulating western platforms, or competent enough that larger networks have not been identified. There's also tinfoil conclusion that these are cheap western intelligence falseflag ops designed to normalize idea that PRC has pervasive coordinated activity to headline readers, i.e. people who thinks 50c operates abroad, even on sites like HN itself when it's against 50c MO to waste effort on anything but platitudes. It's hard to say which is worse, but it doesn't seem likely PRC influence ops on western platforms is restricted to such small scale efforts, if not now, then certainly not in the future.
the PRC could use low-effort attacks just as fodder which mimics any actual false flag performed by any country. And, this isn't conspiracy, either, yet maybe too speculative for your average HN user (who doesn't seem to think too highly of your post, either), but if its already known that you have a problem with unscrupulous conspiracy theorists then that's a vector for state actors to exploit/inflame/exacerbate it across multiple channels/theaters. I'm not sure if it extends across the entire western countries, but here in America we already have an admitted problem with so-called conspiracy theorists.
I say this much because I highly agree: 60 accounts says this isn't serious. And, if its not "serious" then this is more psychological than cyber.
Also, you have to consider the open use of war games which would simulate a de facto false flag, without being a de jure false flag.
Welcome to the lowest rung of hell, I'd say! The realm of perfidy.
We're not supposed to question it, but in this case it seems salient: your account was created just to post this and it's got a lot of upvotes for something seemingly banal.
First, there point was that this post seems to engage in similar tactics. The report existing doesn't mean this isn't some counter information campaign.
Second, the post links to an article about that report, and though the article mentions 189 twitter accounts the report only lists 62. Similarly, they don't show close to the 62000 tweets mentioned in the article from what I could see.
1) The point is bogus. The upvote trajectory is typical for a HN frontpage submission. If you think there's an upvote ring, the appropriate behavior is to message moderators. The expected value of throwing around a random accusation without proof is zero.
2) I don't know where they took the 189 from, but the other numbers match what the report says. It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.
1 is a fair criticism of that post. Posting the report isn't.
>It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.
It's not a minor point, the article was what is posted here for discussion. No matter how reliable the report is the article may be suspect.
I figured out how they got the 98000 too, it's the total number of interactions the Ambassadors tweets got. Using that number in the bullet point when the report claims well under half of them were part of the campaign is intentionally misleading.
> The report existing doesn't mean this isn't some counter information campaign
But it uses the name/rep of an actual university, and presumably is data is open for peer review? a "counter information" campaign that fights falsehood with truth is fine in my book. I'd call that an "awareness campaign".
You are only looking at the report. As a comparison, the report is like the Ambassador's tweet, though it may be biased it's unlikely to be part of any disinformation campaign. The article and the article being posted here are like the bot retweets and replies, taking one legitimate piece of information and both distorting it and spreading it wider than it normally would go.
This. Even the website bitterwind just looks like an attack site against China. It seems to just have “articles” that just say negative things about China. This is just seems to be another play in an influence campaign.
A lot of people are concerned about their online history based on what is happening in Hong Kong with people being arrested and charged for things they said in the past.
Once you set foot in China and now even Hong Kong, all bets are off.
Odd that an academic paper would fail to mention the work of the UK company Bell Pottinger that conducted a deliberate, paid Twitter campaign with thousands of false account in 2018 with the intent to stoke a racial war (nevermind overturn democracy) in South Africa on behalf of the former president's faction and a family of Indian criminals.
From what I understand it bloody nearly succeeded. Perhaps the Chinese learnt from the great job the British did?
Why is it odd that an academic paper wouldn't mention it? Is every academic paper required to replay the entire history of the universe from the big bang onwards?
That's not what the above comment said. It asked why didn't the academic paper discuss it in a manner that is attempting to cast suspicion on the findings. You discuss your own findings, quite frankly I'm not entirely sure their point. That Oxford shares the same country as this company? Is it somehow obligated based on this?
It would be ok to discuss another topic, but this particular case was using the behavior of a private British firm to somehow make the researchers look hypocritical (or having an agenda) because they are also based in the UK
Discussions are like soccer: if you go out of bounds you lose possession. We can't be talking about everything at the same time, that's exactly how you stifle discussion.
So human researchers were able to spot a pretty obvious pattern. How come Twitter's own staff and algorithms never seem to catch on, despite having even more data to look at?
It amazes me that Twitter fails at something so basic -- identifying and shutting down bot networks -- and has been failing at it for so long. Here's a report from 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38724082). Another one from 2014 (https://medium.com/i-data/fake-friends-with-real-benefits-ee...). If you look through the archives you will find similar reports going back 15 years.
Someone on HN (can't find the ref) once speculated that Twitter has an incentive not to shut down the fake accounts because the fakes boosts user numbers and "engagement" which correlate with profit. Twitter is certainly making a lot: I once looked into running a Twitter ad campaign for my business until I saw projected $2+ clicks. Are the massive margins suggested by those CPCs built on the backs of fake accounts?