HP Labs Research on "Twitter Cyborgs" and spam

TWITTER CYBORGS
Miranda Mowbray, HP Labs
miranda.mowbray @ hp.com
and Nazareno Andrade, TU Delft

“A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one"
New York Times
22 May 1960

TWIT(TER)MINOLOGY
Tweets
Public timeline
Followers
Direct messages
Followees
Follow ratio
Trend

SOME RELATED WORK
Java et al: follower and followee counts are correlated and have approx power-law distributions. Some automated use detected.
A Java, X Song , T Finin and B Tseng, “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, August 2007
Hubspot: the median number of tweets, followers, and followees are all zero.
D Zarella, “State of the Twittersphere”, June 2009
Cheng and Evans, Sysomos.com: 24% of all tweets made by accounts posting >150 tweets/day.
A Cheng and M Evans, “Inside Twitter: An in-depth look inside the Twitter world”, June 2009, and “Inside Twitter: An In-Depth Look at the 5% of Most Active Users” August 2009
Mowbray: dramatic rise in Summer ‘09 of accounts with > 100 tweets/day.
M Mowbray, “The Twittering Machine”, April 2010 http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2010/HPL-2010-54.pdf

OUR DATA
13447 twitterers
Randomly sampled from public timeline between 22 April and 3 May 2010
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.xml
1257 spammers
Reported to Twitter over 7 days

RISE OF THE TWITTER CYBORGS

RISE OF THE TWITTER CYBORGS, IIPercentage of sampled tweets that are from users sending >100 tweets/day

“It’s about humans connecting with each other, and often in ways in which they couldn’t otherwise”
EvWilliams
Co-founder of Twitter
BBC interview, 5 August 2009

WHAT ARE THE CYBORGS DOING?
Of the 33 sampled cyborgs tweeting > 700 times/day:
marketing and e-commerce
Both legit businesses and porn/phishing sites
services for which frequent updates are useful
Clocks, weather data, software update announcements, news headlines
services for which they aren’t all that useful
Torrent site, website rating site, online pastebin

FOLLOWEE COUNTS

FOLLOWBACK DATA
Experiment by Catalin Cosoi
5/10 for fake users with many tweets
Follow ratios for sampled spammers
0.3/10 for spammers with < 5 tweets
4.2/10 for spammers with ≥ 5 tweets
So if you’re a spammer, tweet at least 5 times

THE PROBLEM WITH MEGAPHONES
Image by Jonas Boni / daoro on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/daoro/3382798413
CC licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en_GB

FOUR CYBORG SPAMMING TECHNIQUESand how Twitter might defend against them

CYBORG SPAMMING 1
Mention spam
Mention usernames in tweets
Tweets are automatically sent to users whose names are mentioned
May tempt the user to follow you
Possible defence by Twitter:
Limit number of different usernames one user can mention in a time period
Excluding names of their followers

CYBORG SPAMMING 2
Trend spam
Automatically include trend words in your tweets
Notoriously, #iranelection
Tweet will be shown if a user clicks on the trend in the trends list
Or does a Twitter-search for the trend
Possible defences by Twitter:
Order search results based on reputation
Suppress multiple-trend tweets

CYBORG SPAMMING 3
Fake-retweet spam
Abuse retweet convention
“RT @name” convention for quoting others’ tweets
Abuse this to make your ad or phishing URL appear to be from someone else
Track retweets, suppress “implicit” ones
Machinery to do this is already in place

CYBORG SPAMMING 4
Follow spam
Follow lots of users, send tweets or DMs to those that follow back
Some target types of user to follow
Some churn followees to get round Twitter’s ~2000 limit
“Auto-Follow, Auto-Unfollow, Auto-Tweet & DM.”
Require a CAPTCHA solution to follow a user
Unless the user follows you first

A SAD STORY FROM XKCD
Image from xkcd.com, http://xkcd.com/632 ,
CC licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

VARIANTS
Twitter zombies
Used to be human, account compromised
Eg. Barack Obama’s account
“To increase your follower count, type your Twitter password here”
Twitter werewolves
Automated only at certain times, human otherwise
Eg. Facebook games advertising on players’ Twitter accounts
Eg. Human account owner agrees to include automated ads

LESSONS FOR HUMAN+CYBORG ENVIRONMENTS
Be careful when you release your API
But do release it
Limit automated use of the system
Increase cost (in time, money or effort) of unwanted cyborg behaviours
Opt-in-only marketing can still have large negative externalities
Don’t let cyborg marketers do lots of attention-catching at small or zero cost

Thanks

HP Labs Research on "Twitter Cyborgs" and spam

by Hewlett-Packard on Jun 23, 2010

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HP Labs Research on "Twitter Cyborgs" and spam — Presentation Transcript