[twitter-dev] Re: need twitter spam for a research project
Followers tweeting nonsense or just tweeting sentences that just don't quite fit with reality is exactly what I'm hoping to identify. It's easy enough to find a known spammer and block them, but my hope is to identify a spam account before they ever actually send any links. There are certainly some categories of spammers that this approach will not work on, although they are easy enough to detect using other means. I have observed a trend of bots that attempt to appear human and those are the ones that I hope to identify. I will have something completed by about two weeks from now so I'll post with how effective it is. @johnsheehan I just followed you, I'll keep an eye on your followers for spammers. For others, I'm @jeff_tucker on twitter so please if you find an interesting spam account that is trying to look human let me know so I can grab their account history before twitter bans them, I'm primarily interested in their initial tweets prior to sending out links. I've noticed that if I start using keywords on trending topics then I get hits, although not nearly as many as I am hoping to get (imagine that, complaining about not getting enough spam). I'll keep trying and I think an algorithm that attempts to create the optimal post to attract the most spammers would be an interesting project as well, I may expand my research at some point in the future. Thanks everyone, appreciate the help. -Jeff On Apr 3, 9:55 pm, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky zn...@borasky- research.net wrote: On Sun, 3 Apr 2011 21:34:54 -0700 (PDT), John Sheehan johnshee...@gmail.com wrote: You can use my account as an example. I'm currently getting between 50 and 150 follow spams per day for the last 3 weeks. Here's a graph that demonstrates the 'attack'http://screencast.com/t/xl7zcgdYI If you have any other questions, I'm @johnsheehan and can be reached via email same user name at gmail. John Interesting - most of the followers I've been getting are real humans, not that they're all that interesting humans. ;-) There was a period when I was getting a bunch of followers that were tweeting nonsense, sometimes not even real sentences. Eventually one or two them started to tweet links. Apparently the way they work is to build a network - if one of them follows you and you don't block them, then they copy each other. I suppose it's possible to collect data via the API and do graph theory analysis on these accounts to isolate the clusters, but it hardly seems worth the effort when there are so many accounts just spamming multiple trending topics apparently with little interference from Twitter. -- http://twitter.com/znmebhttp://borasky-research.net A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- Paul Erdős -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
[twitter-dev] Re: need twitter spam for a research project
Wow, this is great data, finding all kinds of stuff. These types of spammers I think are going to be really easy to find with my approach. I'm going to have to tweak my knowledge base a bit but that's ok, I think that this is actually going to work. Thanks! On Apr 9, 12:30 pm, Jerome Hughes jro...@gmail.com wrote: Jeff-- while tweeting for the Chicago music club The Hideout, keep a close watch on a search of the term hideout and see plenty in that stream that qualifies many of these sock puppets have patterns to their names and flaky interests that don't quite fit in their bios they'll often RT a reputable publication's tweet about an article immediately after the reputable pub tweets it, see these when the article title includes the keyword hideout believe they're doing this to increase their credibility and have not yet figured out (or needed) to delay the RTs enough after the original tweet to make it look more like it's actually a real person a current example (about which I corresponded with the author just recently, he assured me that they are not doing it themselves, etc.) http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Inside+Gbagbo%27s+luxury+basement+... best, --Jerome Hughes @jromeh @hideoutchicago On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky zn...@borasky-research.net wrote: On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 2:13 AM, Jeff Tucker fred.f.cho...@gmail.comwrote: Followers tweeting nonsense or just tweeting sentences that just don't quite fit with reality is exactly what I'm hoping to identify. It's easy enough to find a known spammer and block them, but my hope is to identify a spam account before they ever actually send any links. There are certainly some categories of spammers that this approach will not work on, although they are easy enough to detect using other means. I have observed a trend of bots that attempt to appear human and those are the ones that I hope to identify. I will have something completed by about two weeks from now so I'll post with how effective it is. Interesting - I haven't seen that type of bot following me in a long time. Maybe the maker read http://borasky-research.net/2011/02/18/this-is-not-the-blog-post-abou...and put me on a do not follow because he'll send my name to Twitter list. ;-) -- http://twitter.com/znmebhttp://borasky-research.net A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- Paul Erdős -- Twitter developer documentation and resources:http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter:http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
[twitter-dev] need twitter spam for a research project
I'm conducting a research project involving proactively identifying twitter spam accounts before they actually start spamming. I've observed that some spammers attempt to create tweets that look like they're a legitimate account prior to actually sending spam and my project is to be able to identify those accounts as soon as they pop up. Unfortunately (I can't believe that I'm writing this) I am having a hard time getting spammers to actually spam me. Is there any way that I can somehow get access to the tweets of several dozen spam accounts (prior to when they're shut down) so that I can see what they're posting? Is this possible somehow? Also, if anyone gets spammed regularly, are you interested in helping me out with my research? No guarantee that I'll actually publish this, but anyone interested will be credited in my paper in the acknowledgements. Thanks -Jeff Tucker Lecturer, DigiPen Institute of Technology www.digipen.edu -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
