‘Gosh, Stacy, There’s No Way @Twitter Could Spot All These Fake Accounts’

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Excuse me for belaboring the obvious, but I’ve gotten pretty damned fed up with certain “friends” making excuses for Twitter’s inability to stop this influx of spambot accounts. So say hello to Patsy Moen (@MsGiovanna__Sto), Zakary Greenfelder (@Chet_Senger_967), Kirsten Stiedemann (@Conroy_Evan7897), Myrna Schulist Sr. (@MissNia_Kulas__), Annamarie Eichmann (@MrsGerhold_Cory) and Laurie Lehner (@Block_Lia_1657):






Honestly, I’m trying to maintain a sense of humor about this:

The problem is that the ease with which these spammers have gamed the system — creating a simple algorithmic software program that auto-generates thousands upon thousands of these fake accounts — exposes gross negligence by Twitter personnel that degrades the quality of the network, and this is highly relevant now that Twitter is seeking to take their product to the public capital markets:

Last December, Twitter announced that it had more than 200 million active users — people who used the service at least once a month.
A few months later, CEO Dick Costolo told employees he expected to get to 400 million users by the end of 2013, according to people familiar with the company. . . .
One factor that may have thrown off Twitter’s growth targets from earlier this year has been spam. The company went through a significant campaign to get rid of bogus accounts earlier in the year, people familiar with the company said. That effort was successful enough that it ended up shrinking Twitter’s true user number.

Big headlines for the big news:

A Short Post, a Big Splash: #TwitterIPO
— New York Times

Investors expect Fed to tap brakes
— Twitter going public —
Goldman scores top underwriting spot
— Politico

Twitter Files for Initial Public Offering
— Wall Street Journal

Yet the same week they announced their IPO, we discover Twitter can’t stop the cheesy spambot program that generates thousands of accounts like Dr. Miller Pacocha (@BoehmPierce_296), Miss Demetris Heaney (@DrMetz_Dewitt__), Jermaine O’Conner (@Nader_Zackary45), Blanche Tremblay (@MrsHauck_Gertru) and Mr. Greg Hudson (@Shanny_Batz6276):






Even as spam accounts flood onto Twitter, however, the accounts of actual human beings are suspended because of phony “abuse” claims:

Since 2011, at least, conservative activists have complained about “Twitter gulag,” the repeated suspension of accounts prompted by multiple bogus abuse reports from leftist thugs who systematically target their Republican-leaning antagonists. The fact that there is now a Twitter Gulag Defense Network (hashtag #tgdn) to warn users and assist conservative activists targeted for suspension, tells you all you need to know about the ineffectiveness of Twitter’s policies.

How many $100-an-hour programmers does Twitter have on its payroll? How many hours would it take for such a programmer to identify the source of these spambot accounts? And how many more hours would it take to write a code that blocks the spammers?

OK, so once Twitter’s programmers identified the source and blocked the program, how long would it take for a $150-an-hour attorney to write up a criminal complaint against the spammers, documenting the fraud, and to deliver that complaint to the FBI? See, this isn’t just a “terms of service” violation, this is deliberate systematic electronic fraud — a federal felony under various statutes — and until the perpetrators are indicted and prosecuted for their crimes, there is no real incentive to discourage anyone else from doing the same thing.

Twitter needs to get serious about this problem, and my “friends” need to stop telling me that this isn’t a serious problem, because I’m well past the point of tolerating such bullshit advice.

 

TELL @TWITTER @SUPPORT TO STOP THE BOTS!

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


67 comments

  7. Stacy check your own logs- Do an Ip Check on the bots that attack this website you’ll find they come from all over the planet…

    Yep that 150 buck an hour lawyer can write up a complaint and take it to the FBI, but who is going to make the arrests in China, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, Nigeria, Brazil and a mess of other countries that aren’t really concerned about United States Law.. In fact it wouldn’t surprise if some governments host botnets themselves, just to harass dissidents

    Keep hoping that someday someone will invent a backfire script- One that senses a botnet attack and sends a malicious script back to the botnet’s host server, causing it to meltdown..better yet catch fire.

    Much faster and more efficient than lawyers..

  8. That one of the fake accounts has the last name Eichmann makes one fat no-neck turd a suspect. Birds of the feather, Freudian slips and all that.

  9. My Evil Plan (TM):

    1) Twitter applies for IPO.
    2) Bloggers (lead by Stacy) publicize weaknesses and partisanship in Twitter security.
    3) IPO tanks, making shares dirt cheap.
    4) Bloggers buy up a TON of cheap shares.
    5) Angry and less rich Twitter founders show up to first public shareholders meeting to meet angry conservative blogger shareholders!

    **BRING ON THAT IPO, brother!!!***

    ~Johnny~

  10. This is the reason so many online ventures fail. For 90% of them, their only salable product is eyes to read their advertisers messages yet they insist because of the personal biases of their employees in alienating at least half of their possible customer base, the conservative, flyover America, from the get-go. This is why operations like the “big three” nets, AOL, Yahoo!, etc. slide into ruin.

    It’s why the bloom is off the Facebook rose, and why its overhyped IPO lost so much of its value so fast. The toxic lefty nature of the YouTube commentariat and YouTube’s own willingness to cater to the left over conservatives is without question holding it back from even greater market pre-eminence.

    Twitter can be reliably counted on to block or ban conservative posters with far greater frequency than any leftists, and to leave the most toxic leftist behavior unhampered.

    They have to be convinced that this is Bad for Bidness. Maybe Stacy should pitch an article about this and the IPO to Forbes, IBD, WSJ, etc. (Probably not much point in Bloomberg)…

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