2. However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue check doesn't go away.
3. So the scam is that some bad guy buys a previously verified account, changes the profile pic and display name to someone else famous, then uses it to phish.
#2 is colossally stupid, and is trivial to prevent (lots of dating sites require profile changes and pic changes to be reviewed before going live). Apparently this has been going on a long time so is baffling to me.
> However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue check doesn't go away.
I worked at Twitter and built the verification service. I recalled that this was the case back in 2012. You couldn't change your name or username if you were verified (or if you change one of those, you would lose the checkmark).
I believe around 2015/2016, a verified account I follow changed his name and avatar (but not username) to "Italian Elon Musk", and a Mario mustache and hat superimposed on Musk's then avatar. He made many posts along the lines of "I skippa tha taxes! Mamma mia!". Pretty obviously a joke, and after a while (I think a few days), he lost his tick, which I think was in a way his goal all along.
So if you're saying such changes for verified accounts have been disallowed since 2012, and if my dates are somewhat accurate, then I don't think that's right. But maybe you're just saying it used to be disallowed around 2012, not that it became disallowed then.
I can see why that requirement was dropped, because display name is sometime used as a profile line. e.g.:
- “Corporate, Inc. @ tradeShow Hall A”
- “DisplayName / A Trusted Brand”,
- “Individual (LIVE 09/21 21:00-)”,
etc.
Profile pics change for similar reasons. screenname(@username) is the only bitwise consistent visual element for a Twitter account so there will have to be either a magical audit algorithms to verify user perceived consistencies for changes, or simply a degraded experiences with impacts on engagements for verified users, to enforce that.
I'm an uncool dad but thought the check mark was like, this account really is the famous person the account claims to be, like Brad Pitt or Oprah. Now it's always someone I've never heard of.
Famous to who though and how famous? I recently clicked through to a profile of someone I had never heard of and they had 5m+ followers. This isn't a "look how out of touch I am with pop culture" humblebrag they were just from a different part of the world, famous in a language I don't speak.
And maybe not too similar but the mayor of my city only has a couple tens of thousands of followers but is definitely known by everyone who lives in it and yes has a blue check.
How famous is famous enough isn't a question with an obvious, or single answer.
My brother in law has a blue check. He writes comic blogs and wrote a book about them, so he does have a public persona. But he has less than 5000 followers and he is certainly not famous.
Could they simply disable the ability to change display names for verified users? It must match the government-issued ID / business documents / etc. that were used to verify in the first place. If you want to change it, send updated verification documents.
This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it would be a step in the right direction...
> Could they simply disable the ability to change display names for verified users?
I don't know if I agree with this solution, but it is bizarre that there are plenty of blue checks where neither their twitter @id nor their display name have anything to do with their actual name. Who is the blue check verifying that they are?
I propose showing the verified identity (whether that's a stage name or whatever) on mouseover on the blue check icon. I'll take my consulting fee through paypal.
Sometimes people are famous under a username or pseudonym. Also Twitter generally verifies people at risk of being impersonated. It doesn't matter if you know who say CZ is but if thousands of people would pretend to be him and others will fall for it it helps to verify who the real one is.
Though clearly they should disable name changing post verification or something so the checkmark itself doesn't help to impersonate others.
And sometimes famous blue checks have an id that is unrelated to any name they have been known by, and a display name unrelated to any name they have been known by. I know this because I follow people like this. I know who they are verified to be, but that name is nowhere associated with their account.
Well, it kind of makes sense if you have e.g. a big youtube channel under and alias and people would know who you are based on that (e.g. Veritasium) but less people would know what your actual name is. However I don't use twitter so I have no idea how liberally this sort of thing is applied
> It must match the government-issued ID / business documents / etc. that were used to verify in the first place. If you want to change it, send updated verification documents.
That seems like a bad requirement, because I'd imagine a lot of these legitimately-verified accounts go by professional names (e.g. actors, authors with a pen name, etc.) not legal names.
A sane policy would be that there's a process for verified accounts to change their name, and that process is that some human at Twitter sees the account's current name and new name and rejects changes that aren't obviously still "the same person." A policy like this could prevent these kind of "pretend to be Vitalik or Elon or whoever" schemes without actually having to review the verification itself.
So you can still allow hashtags and emoji and so on being stuck onto names, still allow "spooky" Halloween names, but preserve some kind of value from the verified checkmark.
I don't know how many verified users there are but this doesn't seem like it would necessarily be onerous. Of course, it's still more onerous than just doing nothing about it is.
You can be flexible in the initial validation - it's reasonable to allow William Jefferson Clinton to go by Bill Clinton if he wants to.
And it's reasonable to allow name changes - it's not unusual for people to get married, or for companies to rebrand.
But why let people change names without repeating the validation process? It's not like people are getting married several times a year or anything like that.
I think business documentation in these cases is obvious choice. So you present good enough claim to that name or what ever and you get verification. This however means it is not personal account, but tied to that name or entity. Whoever owns it.
Facebook policy is to require a real name for every user. I'm struggling to see how that's relevant here.
If you want to tweet under an anonymous pseudonym -- great! We are talking about an optional verification feature for a subset of users who are at risk of impersonation. These people choose to participate in this program because they want their identity to be clear and legitimate.
People get verified because they're pretty well known, and people are rarely known by their legal names.
Celebrities are the obvious example, you probably know who Eminem or Lady Gaga are, but very few people know who Marshall Bruce Mathers III or Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta are. Others might also want to have their title in there names, for example presidents, professors, kings etc.
True, and there should be a way for people to get verified and use their professional / public persona names as Verified Identities.
They just don't get to change the name or image on the account without going through a manually verified update process. Pretty trivial, a singer goes on a new tour and wants to use a new headshot, checks out faster than reading this paragraph. A cracker hijacks the account and wants to change it to Vitalik Buterin, also pretty obvious to deny, as this is clearly a different identity inconsistent with the previous one.
That isn't always easy to verify though if you aren't familiar with the person, their public image, and their current events.
For example if Ed Sheeran changes their profile picture to an X, how do you know he means his Multiply album and not some terrible Lil Nas X impersonation. What about if a performer changes their stage name? Can we reliably expect Twitter research this change and know that its the same person?
>>Can we reliably expect Twitter research this change and know that its the same person?
Um, yes — it is their job. Most will be easy and some will be harder.
I understand that some small subset of people can have different public-facing roles. Perhaps the solution is to allow two accounts for each? After all, one can have one for your person and one for your company.
>This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it would be a step in the right direction...
or you know, women changing their surnames after getting married ...
> might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it would be a step in the right direction...
Edge cases which can get people irreversibly dead. Doesn’t seem like the right direction to me.
Twitter users love changing their profile picture/name to support the current cause of the moment so much that it’s become a meme. Changing that would piss off their active posters.
No problem: add a second line with the verified name, or put the verified name in hover text if it differs from the display name. The verified name could still be a pseudonym, but it couldn't change without going through the verification process again.
Also, anyone willing to go through the verification process should get a blue check. Right now it's dependent on some Twitter insider liking the account holder (the insanely bullshit "Notable" requirement).
> or put the verified name in hover text if it differs from the display name
This isn't really a solution, because it's already "obvious" that it's the wrong user if you're looking closely. The UI shows "Vitalik.eth [verified checkmark] @scamusername" so you can see that @scamusername is not @vitalik. The problem is that you shouldn't need to look at the light text or hover to see that a verified user is who they say they are, the UI should make it completely clear.
This is obviously not true, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I'm not a twitter scientist, but I don't know what an "account name" is, unless it's the twitter handle. The twitter handles of blue checks are verifiably not required to have any relationship to a name that anyone knows them by, so are not a "verified name."
You'd still have edge cases where a change in verified name is needed (marriages, avoiding deadnaming, etc). A solution like this might narrow the problem space, but it doesn't solve the issues.
That would kill a lot of Twitter culture though (for better or worse). Changing a name for "spooky season", updating a profile pic to promote a new event, etc. It also would make it risky for a large company to change their logo (if Volvo loses verification for a few days it opens them up to a ton of scams).
Before I got off of Twitter years ago, friends of mine would make a background image with a blue checkmark and then add it to their profile so it looked like you were verified.
Easier than going through all the channels. Not sure if this still works, but a clever hack to get around (at the time) a very long process to get your identity verified.
>2. However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue check doesn't go away.
afaik twitter will remove your verification status if you do this maliciously. Like trying to impersonate a famous person and make it look like they're saying something stupid.
It's not a very good system either because it's called verification, but it's actually indicating popularity or notoriety. People hear "verified" and correlate that with trustworthiness when all that check mark is really indicating is "this person appears to be famous."
About once a week I get a mass message from a random twitter account with extremely clear spam (they even leave the group message after they send it!). They are often centered around crypto. I don't know how they are this bad because a Naive Bayesian Classifier could block this stuff.
> If changes to your account are misleading or substantially alter the persona present on your account
You will lose the badge if you try to do the 2nd. But currently it doesn't proactively apply preventative measures, which is definitely a problem. Twitter obviously doesn't have bandwidth to proactively prevent all those scams, but at least last reviewed profiles should be visible to users for verification.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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..
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.
My problem with twitter is not even user spam, but twitters own engagement spam, it seems to be impossible to just see the content of people I follow
I recently signed up first time after like 8 years to follow a handful of interesting accounts. But only maybe 20% of stuff I see is actually from them, the rest is all suggestions by twitter what people/topics I should follow or what people that the people I follow follow posted, etc. And there only seems to be ways to show "fewer" of something, not get rid of it altogether. Completely useless. I reckon there are third party apps and browser extensions to filter this, but since I don't care about those few accounts I follow enough either, I couldn't be bothered and deleted my account again.
Latest temporary mitigation snakeoil is searching for “filter:follows -filter:replies include:nativeretweets” and using that search page as home timeline.
> I recently signed up first time after like 8 years to follow a handful of interesting accounts
I've done that a few times over the years and have always later ended up deleting my account for the same reason I didn't have one in the first place. Then I realized how silly it is to sign up to follow someone when you can just bookmark their profile and check up on them every now and then—the same way anyone not using RSS would "follow" the Web sites they were interested in ~15 years ago.
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
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Twitter and Instagram seem to be overloaded with bots. In my Twitter DMs I get 5-10 messages per day from clear crypto-scams, and under posts from high profile people there are loads of bots.
Instagram is no better, bots comment some obvious scam statement "Who wants to see me naked" with 140 likes on a post that was just created. Instagram doesn't want to address the problem because it gives them fake "user" numbers.
This isn’t a Twitter problem, it’s a symptom of the fact crypto is full of hucksters. If you lie down with dogs you get fleas. The rest of us have a 99% spam-free experience.
Can somewhat concur, I follow around 80 accounts, and most of my feed aren't spam - at least, not obviously spam. I don't follow political or crypto accounts.
I did notice crypto-inclined people (Elon Musk!) do attract a significantly higher number of obvious bots in their replies.
The problem is thus amplified because these big dawgs are moaning about it.
Forgive me for not caring.
This is like King Charles the 3rd complaining about his dripping pen (true current news story). I'm sure it incredibly annoying to him but to the rest of people it's laughable.
I'll accept that it's a problem for followers of these big dawgs.
But maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.......
>"This is like King Charles the 3rd complaining about his dripping pen (true current news story). I'm sure it incredibly annoying to him but to the rest of people it's laughable."
Given the enormous amount of stress and pressure he is currently under, not just as the new King, but also having just had his mother die, I'm impressed at his composure. I suspect most of us would have snapped and shown far greater emotion.
Without trying to be mean, I'm less charitable. He's had a lifetime to prepare and the resources of money, power, staff and literally an entire nation to support him in his time of transition.
I have deep compassion for him for the loss of his mother. I have zero compassion in terms of the position he finds himself in. With the support he has, he could run his life on auto-pilot. By comparison, I'm more impressed by the average Joe or Jane in the street holding down their lives (often alone) while coping with that loss. And I'm damned sure that a leaky pen wouldn't be their breaking point.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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'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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Maybe twitter likes the spam. It gets people like Paul Graham to complain about it on twitter thereby generating more user engagement and ad revenue. Keep up the good work, Paul.
I can't use Twitter, I don't know how to use it. Sometimes I do these "latest" searches in order to see if GitHub or something else is down, or when there's a breaking news of worldwide relevance in order to get to know what's happening. But even these searches are 95% useless junk tweets in between of some relevant tweets.
The "following"-thing hasn't worked for me for around a decade, there's just too much garbage in the stream or main page or whatever it is called.
And for a couple of months now I've noticed that when I use it on a device which is not logged into Twitter, usually because a Reddit post leads me to it, it has agressive Instagram-like tactics in wanting you to log in or sign up and in that state has the same aggressive, unwelcoming vibe which Pinterest has.
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 got banned for life from Twitter for tweeting "sheesh, I'd kill myself if I was still programming in java after age 50" (or something like that -- I've since deleted the tweet and can't remember the wording, but the gist is correct.)
This was viewed as "encouraging self harm" so I got a lifetime ban.
Yes, it was my second offense. A week or two earlier I had tweeted "I wish anti-vaxxers would go jump off a bridge". So that was two strikes and I got the lifetime ban instantly -- within less than two seconds -- while also being informed that my lifetime ban had been "after careful review".
In any case, I'm a real human being and I can't use Twitter anymore.
So the bots run free, but my obviously human account got a lifetime ban for tweets that could not possibly be seriously construed as dangerous. Honestly, the tweets are barely noteworthy. Also, I had something like 28 followers and I was little more than an occasional reply guy.
Also, aside from the bots, the amount of absolutely ridiculously bad taste stuff I see tweeted that doesn't result in a lifetime ban is astonishing.
Supposedly I can appeal my ban but I haven't done so because I'm dead certain that if I do I will just get an even more solid lifetime ban, along with all my personal details stored in their list of atrocious actors. I guess I'm holding out for Elon Musk to be forced to buy Twitter and for some changes to take place.
Twitter's moderation, like every major such website, is a Kafkaesque nightmare with little transparency or review. It would all be fine if they just deleted individual posts. Then it'd be no big deal on an occasional bad call. But nuking accounts in this slipshod way is terrible.
Twitter IS a use case where relevant people post good insights.
Yet, Twitter as a product lost focus many years ago what they want to be and for whom.
The product has terrible discovery and search. Velocity is super-high so you are missing posts all the time (and people miss yours).
And unless you have an audience already it is broken for 99% of the users for content distribution.
Further, I am convinced that a lot of the reported "users" are copies of the same person behind it, bots, or apps.
All of this was motivation that led into building finclout. Having identity/reputation managed on-chain IS a use case where blockchain makes sense. and is really important to understand if a source is credible or not. There is a lot of spam, fakes, and pumps on Twitter which makes most "social sentiment" ML models worthless.
Twitter is unusable unless you are using a third-party client (which they don't give full access to). I sometimes tweet into the void about issues but rarely read twitter anymore except during something like an Apple event when I want to see what a handful of people are saying.
Scrolling through my main feed (on the official web/client) is utter garbage. Sponsored-this, suggested-that, your-friend-liked, your-friend-also-follows, etc. Kill me. I want to read tweets from the specific people I follow, I don't need suggestions, I don't need the algorithm, I sure as hell don't care about followers-of-followers-type shit. The notifications I get from Twitter are also terrible, like I've given Twitter more than enough info over the last decade+ that it shouldn't be showing me certain suggested tweets (or whatever they call that block of random tweets they inject under a tweet I'm looking at).
Twitter, like most large tech companies, astounds me. I literally have no clue what their thousands of employees/"engineers" do everyday. I work at a tiny company (<15 total, 6 developers) and it feels like we make way more forward progress in a month than twitter has in the last decade. For over 6 months they completely broke their browser notifications because someone renamed their Twitter account to "tweet" and so browser notifications would open that user's account instead of the tweet it was being linked to (the URL the browser would open would be something like /tweet?id=XXXXXXXX). It's fucking ametuer hour over there and they are wasting their time on adding things like podcasts to Twitter? They doesn't deserve to succeed.
Most social media sites lack self-moderation, which leads to problems like this that aren't curable in the long term. Sure, Twitter shouldn't allow checkmarks to change names, but there will still be bots. Facebook of all things is really the cleanest, since your "friends" on there tend to at least be acquaintances IRL and most of what you see just comes from them, but it's gotten corrupted a bit over the years.
I've been developing a site a bit like Twitter except for sharing links only. If it had millions of users (which would take a miracle), it wouldn't have these problems. There are no top accounts, trending topics, follower counts, algorithmic recommendations, etc. Instead, you just follow whoever you know personally or seriously care about, and if you like something, you repost it since there's no plain "like." So you can get links from many hops away, but it has to go through a friend. This establishes a self-moderated network similar to how people in real life behave. In closed beta, I've discovered a lot of interesting content (mostly news) that I otherwise wouldn't have, but the project has ways to go.
Similar all over Facebook as well - I've reported hundreds of scams using the exact same verbiage and images in sponsored posts, purporting to be Tesla or SpaceX or Amazon or so-forth selling new crypto tokens, using hacked verified pages. Would be trivial to detect if they cared. But beyond simply not caring, they're actually making money.
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.
The crypto spam on Twitter has really exploded the past couple weeks in particular for me. Seems like every single day I now get multiple @-mention spam notifications from one-off accounts seemingly specializing in just mentioning hundreds/thousands (or more) of users in replies to crypto scams/tweets/offers/etc.
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?
Verified accounts should be required to keep the same display name and handle.
Changes should be limited to adding a hashtag at the end of the display name. Other changes should result in temporary loss of the verified badge until they undo the change.
As for profile pictures, they should be using perceptual hashing to detect similar profile pictures. This isn't particularly hard anymore. They might already be using it to detect copyrighted content, or perhaps they can contribute to existing open-source libraries.
Patti harrison gives an interview about getting kicked off of twitter for using the blue check system to play a prank on nilla wafers.
'There's such a thing as too little fraud' is a take I saw somewhere recently.
Ben Franklin + Alexander Pope both used almanacs, a social media analog from their era, to fake the deaths of opponents (in Franklin's case it was an opposing almanac publisher whose death he predicted in his first issue).
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'm a casual twitter user (unfortunately) and the verification badge really is an issue. You see that way before you see the grey "actual name" and before that, you see the nickname which is basically the name of the impersonators target.
It's pretty obvious when you read it with common sense but when you initially see it, it looks legit.
It's bad for blue checks, I've never had an issue!
Forgive me for not being that sympathetic.
Interesting how it's becoming a major issue now (I mean, it has always has been for big accounts) since the Musky Douchey Hypeman requires it to be a major issue in the upcoming court case.
Personally, advertise yourself with the stench of manure and expect horseflies.
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.
Depending on the circles one frequents on Twitter, "blue checks" are trusted and respected, or mocked and distrusted. There's still no clear messaging on what it means, grants are seemingly arbitrary anymore. It's quite the debacle.
This guy has personally contributed to building the Hell he now inhabits. He yammered about crypto - an outright scam - for years and now he's sad that his feed is full of crypto scammers. There's a meme template for this!
I'd prefer outright crypto scams over all the "There are many ways to improve your life. Here are 30 best ones" threads that have taken over my feed over the last few months. PLEASE give me a way to turn that off.
It's unlikely that PG suddenly discovered Twitter spam problem. Sounds like he's cultivating Musk, or at the very least, trying to signal that he supports him.
A couple of weeks ago, Matt Levine predicted that would happen:
> If you have something to do with Twitter, or you know something about Twitter, or you are in the business of counting Twitter bots, then you should take a few minutes and ask yourself: Well, do I know anything about Twitter doing any massive frauds? If you do… look, I don’t know exactly what you can do with that. (...) Still. I just have a vague general sense that saving the richest person in the world $44 billion is a good career move.
> So you should expect that, over the next month or two, as Musk’s trial date with Twitter approaches, people will be popping up to say “oh sure Twitter is a fraud, massive fraud, totally, I have proof, Elon, call me.”
Yes he probably knew about Twitter's pervasive spam problem before but today has been a particularly bad day, as spammers are deploying a large number of hijacked verified accounts to impersonate the Ethereum founder coinciding with a major network change happening today.
While all spam is bad, scams posted from a fake "verified" account are particularly odious.
The spammers impersonate famous people and then spam the replies of other famous people, for example the fake Vitalik in the OP is a reply to one of paulg's tweets.
If you read the threads under certain people's tweets (or anyone's tweets containing cryptocurrency related keywords) you will have no choice but to wade through copious amounts of this muck.
I'm still not quite clear what qualifies this as "spam" given that you need to opt into viewing the tweets. It seems like a clear-cut case of impersonation. Spam is an entirely different concept that cannot be reduced to "I don't want to see this content" (which would, again, necessarily include ads...).
Granted, I would consider 99% of what pg would likely consider "legitimate" cryptocurrency content to be de-facto spam, but that's just a part of being on the internet at this point. The problem he raises seems negligible in comparison to the other commercial content that pollutes twitter.
Isn’t this one of the reasons why Elon Musk was interested in acquiring Twitter in the first place?
To improve various aspects of the platform as a privately owned company and turn it more into a town square..?
Nobody who is mentally all there has ever claimed that Twitter is perfect. It’s just weird to me that everyone is acting surprised when the truth is Twitter has been getting hate since day one..
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.
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.
1. There are a host of requirements needed to get the blue check: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
2. However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue check doesn't go away.
3. So the scam is that some bad guy buys a previously verified account, changes the profile pic and display name to someone else famous, then uses it to phish.
#2 is colossally stupid, and is trivial to prevent (lots of dating sites require profile changes and pic changes to be reviewed before going live). Apparently this has been going on a long time so is baffling to me.