mathbabe

I often talk about the modeling war, and I usually mean the one where the modelers are on one side and the public is on the other. The modelers are working hard trying to convince or trick the public into clicking or buying or consuming or taking out loans or buying insurance, and the public is on the other, barely aware that they’re engaging in anything at all resembling a war.

But there are plenty of other modeling wars that are being fought by two sides which are both sophisticated. To name a couple, Anonymous versus the NSA and Anonymous versus itself.

Here’s another, and it’s kind of bland but pretty simple: Twitter bots versus Twitter.

This war arose from the fact that people care about how many followers someone on Twitter has. It’s a measure of a person’s influence, albeit a crappy one for various reasons (and not just because it’s being gamed).

The high impact of the follower count means it’s in a wannabe celebrity’s best interest to juice their follower numbers, which introduces the idea of fake twitter accounts to game the model. This is an industry in itself, and an associated arms race of spam filters to get rid of them. The question is, who’s winning this arms race and why?

Twitter has historically made some strides in finding and removing such fake accounts with the help of some modelers who actually bought the services of a spammer and looked carefully at what their money bought them. Recently though, at least according to this WSJ article, it looks like Twitter has spent less energy pursuing the spammers.

It begs the question, why? After all, Twitter has a lot theoretically at stake. Namely, its reputation, because if everyone knows how gamed the system is, they’ll stop trusting it. On the other hand, that argument only really holds if people have something else to use instead as a better proxy of influence.

Even so, considering that Twitter has a bazillion dollars in the bank right now, you’d think they’d spend a few hundred thousand a year to prevent their reputation from being too tarnished. And maybe they’re doing that, but the spammers seem to be happily working away in spite of that.

And judging from my experience on Twitter recently, there are plenty of active spammers which actively degrade the user experience. That brings up my final point, which is that the lack of competition argument at some point gives way to the “I don’t want to be spammed” user experience argument. At some point, if Twitter doesn’t maintain standards, people will just not spend time on Twitter, and its proxy of influence will fall out of favor for that more fundamental reason.