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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Maybe time for a twitter-musk containment thread?

Elon Musk plans to democratize the Twitter verification badge

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587523701452464131

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23435092/elon-musk-twitter-blue-verification-cost-ads-search

Elon Musk has announced that a new version of Twitter Blue will include some sort of verification accessible for $8 per month in the US, with the price “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity.” He announced the shake-up of the premium service by saying that “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.”

Musk also says that the service will get you:

Priority in replies, mentions, and search, which Musk argues is “essential to defeat spam/scam”

In contrast to the belief that this is bad for scammers and spammers, I think it's the opposite. Scammers, especially crypto scammers, make so much money that $8 is a steal if it means having their tweets be more visible, hence more victims. The July 2020 twitter hack stole $130k of bitcoin using verified accounts, so $8 is nothing. NFT and 'rug pull' scams not uncommonly make hundreds of thousands of dollars too. Verification is expensive and time consuming, which is how you thwart spammers, by making the costs of spam high. Verified accounts sell for $1k or more on the secondary/dark markets, way more than $8. Or you have to send in a a lot of documents proving you are authentic real person, which is time consuming with a low rate of success (some companies will help you get your Twitter account verified , but for a large fee).

'The left' , which includes a lot of journalists, celebrities, and activists, oppose this for obvious reasons. The blue checkmark is a implicit signifier of having politically approved views and being an important person.

Part of the value of verification is that it's hard to obtain. But it does dilute the value of the blue checkmark though, so this means that there will likely be two tiers of verification, with a 'super verification' for important people.

Part of the value of verification is that it's hard to obtain.

No, I don't think it is. The checkmark isn't a sign of having politically approved views, it's given by virtue of being a "notable" person. It's just that Twitter treats "notable" as "having news articles about you". It's not a bad metric, but they also probably have deals with corporations to advertise in exchange, among other things, for letting some people be instantly verified when their following is much smaller than you'd think. This is why you see no-name journalists with verification while massive social media stars aren't.

It's not that the checkmark means you have politically approved opinions, it's that the people who have those opinions also belong to institutions which make deals with Twitter to get the checkmark easier. Over time, people have come to see the ideological capture of the blue checkmark and come to the conclusino that this is deliberate.

The checkmark isn't a sign of having politically approved views, it's given by virtue of being a "notable" person. It's just that Twitter treats "notable" as "having news articles about you".

Those things are generally considered hard to obtain, although there are services that can create fake PR

among other things, for letting some people be instantly verified when their following is much smaller than you'd think.

Yeah this exists, I think.. Brands that spend a lot of $ on twitter ads may get verified. I think there is also spill-over with the NYTs, meaning that all writers get auto-verification, even obscure ones.

Priority in replies, mentions, and search, which Musk argues is “essential to defeat spam/scam”

The question is, do I want to hear more from people who like/need twitter so badly they will pay $8/month for this?

Pro: Official accounts from sports teams and major news outlets will pay up and so be higher in results, legit journalists and authors with good twitter presences will pay up.

Con: Morons trying to make it big will pay up. The accounts I follow that just post art and poetry probably won't. Obscure political takes, probably not. Reply-guys trying to get a following will. The hot-take accounts will pay up and get amplified.

I think paying extra for more reach on Twitter suffers from the same problem that Tinder has: on average, someone spending money on Tinder is probably worse than someone who doesn't. Because if you're hot, you're getting plenty of matches without paying; if you're paying, it is because you aren't getting many matches on your own and therefore probably aren't hot.

Con: Morons trying to make it big will pay up. The accounts I follow that just post art and poetry probably won't. Obscure political takes, probably not. Reply-guys trying to get a following will. The hot-take accounts will pay up and get amplified.

You will always reach the people you follow whether someone pays up or not. Verified accounts have priority in comment replies though and less likely to be filtered on search when tweeting hashtags

Scammers, especially crypto scammers, make so much money that $8 is a steal if it means having their tweets be more visible, hence more victims. The July 2020 twitter hack stole $130k of bitcoin using verified accounts, so $8 is nothing.

Crypto scamming is a serious crime, $8 might not be expensive but it's a paper trail.

depends. It would have to lead to an identity of an individual in an country that allows extrdiction. It would not work in dark markets involving stolen credit cards in Russia or Eastern Europe.

See, the thing I've been seeing about the blue checkmark is a lot of poorly-disguised sneering about "all it means is that the person's identity is verified (you clods who claim it's people with outsized influence being quoted as Gospel on progressive issues)".

That's all it is, and so it doesn't mean they get special treatment or quoted as authorities or anything. Just a means of verifying identity.

So that makes all the crying over "why should we have to pay for this?" sound hypocritical to me. Why do you want or need a blue checkmark? "So I know Professor Doctor Eat The Horse Paste is a trusted and reputable authority, instead of an unverified Doctor Professor Eat The Horse Paste!"

No, it's because you want to retweet and quote "ackshully The Science Says, you bigots, and here's a Real Scientist saying that there is no biological basis for sex".

If you want archaeologists and anthropologists to label skeletons as "who knows what this body was in life, they could have been a Brave and Stunning Valid Real Woman?", because forensic anthropology does not exist and there is no way to differentiate between a male or female skeleton so this six thousand year old set of dead bones could be trans you bigots, then you can damn well pay for the privilege of getting to finger-wag and lecture on social media as An Expert.

I get to shoot my mouth off on here for free, and nobody has to pay a straw's worth of attention to me. If you want to point to your blue check mark as "This is why you should take me seriously", then you can stump up for the licence to demand attention and credulity.

The problem here is that Twitter has rescinded the bluecheck as a form of punishment against users they disapprove of and seemingly denied it to many others for similar reasons.

I actually found the link interesting. Skeleton from the Corded Ware Bronze Age culture that was biologically male but buried in female tradition. (Head facing west, surrounded by jugs instead of weapons.)

They also point out rightly in the article that burial practices were incredibly strict and not something ancient cultures would change lightly. There are of course many other explanations and jumping to the idea that it’s trans for fame is a poor call, but it’s not the worst woke science I’ve seen by a long shot.

Yeah but question becomes exactly what the associated cultural rituals were.

It's one thing if the person opted into it of their own freewill/preference, but there's sufficient quasi-Eunuch 'trans' traditions that I wouldn't really consider to be anything like modern conceptions of free sexual identification

Couldn't it also have been a final "fuck you" to the buried person. Burry a man and political opponent as a woman to screw him in the afterlife.

I bet we could brainstorm a dozen possible alternative interpretations, and I'm not sure an insulting one is particularly likely ... but now you've got me picturing an updated version of one of those comedy articles where they make fun of archaeologists' interpretive skills by applying them to 20th century artifacts.

"By acknowledging that 'Bobby throws like a girl', these peers show sensitivity to Bobby's non-binary gender presentation. The sparse diary entries we have are enough to deduce that Bobby began receiving encouragement at an early stage of xir transition, because although xe still uses xir deadname, they encourage xim to answer to "Sissy", as well, a nickname traditionally given to a respected older sister."

Or the guy who ran from a fight.

In other Musk-Twitter news, these tweets give the impression that Musk is quickly backing off any idea of actual free speech in favour of kowtowing to the usual left wing orgs. I guess we'll see how tokenistic vs. serious this is.

In general, I've been thinking that containment threads should be used more. Perhaps not so that roundup thread is ended entirely - but simply that if there's some topic that gets religitated again and again and again with the same arguments continuously in the subthread, a containment thread could be used for "getting it out of the system" or letting it run its course. At the moment, the Twitter/Musk deal is one thing, but trans stuff also seems to get constantly discussed with the same arguments, and Jan 6 also seems to be a topic that comes up regularly and goes in circles.

I might pay 8 bucks a month to keep away Rings of Power comments.

agree

You also have to balance against taking too much air away from the culture war thread. That being said personally I am sick to death of Twitter comments and trans comments.

Frankly, I'm in favor of that. Having a giant megathread was an artifact of the desire to contain discussion on /r/slatestarcodex, it is in no way something desirable in and of itself. I 100% would love to see the megathread format abolished, and have this place work like a normal forum.

I'd be inclined to look to Chesterton's Fence here. It's rare for forums like this to survive after multiple moves. That has been Zorba's reasoning in the past IIRC.

Oh, I know the reasoning. I just disagree with it. Obviously I'm not that upset or anything, but I think the megathread served its purpose and is kind of a relic of the past.

Trans seems to be the issue on which the activist apparatus has decided to die on. I think it will be unavoidable for a while.

I think making verification a single payment would be far better than monthly. For monthly, they should just make it a premium thing, and attach various benefits to it. Like your tweets are more likely to be promoted to the top. Maybe allow people who are verified AND have premium accounts have the ability to have paid subscribers, and those paid subs can see pallwalled tweets. Maybe even a feature to 'tip' people. If Twitter takes a few percent, then they'll be rolling in dough.

The big deal to a scammer will be the trail of identification that comes with paying money. Twitter probably won't accept a payment directly from crypto so you need a bank account to pay from and you need to get your money into that account. Customer identification laws make both of these steps difficult to perform while keeping your identity secret.

The big deal to a scammer will be the trail of identification that comes with paying money.

This is probably not a problem if you live in Russia or Eastern Europe overall . Getting stolen cards is not a problem

In Eastern Europe we are moving rapidly towards 2fa for credit cards, visa 3d etc.

Twitter probably won't accept a payment directly from crypto so you need a bank account to pay from

There are massive underground industries in stealing credit cards and payment accounts. They can just buy stolen accounts and use those. These scammers are already hacking / buying hacked verified twitter accounts to rename as ēlon müsk who's giving away free crypto at cryptobuy.link.party, just click 'accept' in metamask!

I don't understand how these scammers are making money. There are bots @ing me and like 10 other people with a shitcoin I've never heard of and some banal 'discussion group', I don't even read the whole message before blocking them.

Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?

A lot of otherwise intelligent, at least averagely so, people are surprisingly vulnerable to scams. If it looks any way official, people are inclined through a combination of laziness, fear of penalties, and familiarity (they've had to fill out one hundred replies today, what's one more?) to fall for it.

I've had to dissuade my boss from panic-paying scam invoices, by demonstrating that it is a scam, because they were unaware that this particular scam was going around. I can believe that people who don't know much or anything about bitcoin, are put off because it seems very complicated, but would be interested in buying or investing, would fall for a scam email that promises to make it as easy as possible for them, just send your payment here and we will invest it for you and do all the hard work, and then profit for you!

People will believe in 'free money for nothing' if you wrap the package cleverly enough.

power law. all you need is someone with $100k or more to fall for the scam, or 50 people with $2k, which is not that uncommon with crypto, and that is enough to live a long time in a 3rd or 2nd world country. When people get scammed with crypto, the losses can be very big, such as wallets being hacked, unlike a lot of other type of scams.

Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?

The million normal / below-average people who jumped on crypto not because of an interest in decentralization, experimental financial systems, or more practical applications for cryptography, but because the number went up and it put money in their bank account. Someone's buying and bagholding all the shitcoins after the bots and traders pump them.

Don't forget that making a scam somewhat obvious to skeptical people means that the population of people who the scammer has to invest follow-up time and effort on is more likely to fall for that scam. It's the Nigerian prince bad grammar rube filter.

The scammer that made it big compromised big trusted accounts, the take wasn't just from having blue check marks.

that is true. good point. but then they buy a verified account and rename it it something like "E1onMusk" or "T3sla" to fool people and evade the spam algo, and change the pic too. I saw one that had $2000 btc & doge collected from a single hacked verified account. Turning $8 into $2000 is a pretty good ROI.

But nobody will be following @T3sla, everyone is already following @Tesla. They would need to sit on the account and get followers by acting normal before springing the scam.

They could do something more like phishing though, where they DM users pretending to be customer support and stealing credentials.

They post replies in comments to high-traffic accounts like Musk, Tesla, Vitalik Buterin, etc. But some people are so impulsive that they fail to see that name is misspelled. The sort of person who falls for a crypto scam is probably not that careful.

Fair point.

In contrast to the belief that this is bad for scammers and spammers, I think it's the opposite.

You may be right in that it may not fully stop spammers, but I would argue it would definitely reduce how many there are. There's different types of twitter scams, but the most annoying and most prominent one is when a bad actor spams either replies of tweets of prominent people/tags pre selected accounts in their own tweets. This type of spam requires thousands of accounts per round because twitter actually locks such accounts pretty quickly if you abuse it, so they usually make a dozen tweets per account and then move to the next account. So if someone were to pay $8 per account for such campaign, that would be $8000 per 1000 accounts. Even though it could be profitable to pay this much, that's a much more expensive start up cost for these spammers. Currently, one new twitter account can be bought for around $0.25 and software to spam costs anywhere from a few hundred for shitty ones and thousand for good ones. So that raises startup costs from a few hundred bucks to thousands. And if scammers were to actually pay this much, this is a win for twitter because they would be getting a lot of money from these spammers.

Why can normal accounts suddenly not spam people? That'd require better spam prevention for non-verified accounts, which you can implement without this change. Doesn't seem related.

Elon said that paid accounts will get priority in replies. So, these spam messages will still be there, just at the bottom of the thread, which lowers engagement. Currently, if you check replies under tweets of some prominent figures, in the first few mins after the tweet all replies are bots

Currently, if you check replies under tweets of some prominent figures, in the first few mins after the tweet all replies are bots

... right ... because they are bots, and can post a reply 2 seconds after the tweet is posted. Nobody else has replied in the first few minutes. And then the bot replies get overtaken by interesting replies that get likes. How would boosting verified accounts change this? The verified accounts still won't reply immediately because they aren't bots.

A lot of spam is just bots using the search api (probably) for crypto terms and replying to people with scams. This won't help with that either.

Also, significantly boosting verified accounts over nonverified accounts to stop the kind of spam that gets lots of likes on highly replied tweets (non-highly replied tweets don't have enough replies for it to matter) would degrade the user experience, right, because instead of seeing the best tweets you just see tweets from people who pay money?

The thing about fraud/scams is that the supply curve slopes downwards. When you put in hoops to jump through you raise the cost of doing fraud as well as the cost of being a real person just trying to do their thing. The name of the game is to raise the cost for scammers by a lot, but for real people by only a little.

Right now, the cost of doing fraud/scams is mostly being good at selenium scripting through a botnet (cheap). An $8 charge passing through the ordinary financial system is a lot harder to do. Certainly far from impossible, but the set of people who can both do selenium scripting through a botnet and pass fake charges through the financial system is much smaller - the net result is we get less of it.

Here's a short list of people who I can say with 100% certainty know and have deeply internalized this fact: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, all of whom got very rich by doing a good job putting this principle into practice.

You didn't answer the question. How does making blue checkmarks cost money raise the cost of scams? You can still run scams with nonverified accounts exactly like you do now. Some people, but a small fraction, run scams with stolen verified accounts - those people will just switch to fresh paid verified accounts. But most scams weren't run with verified accounts before this change, and still won't be run with verified accounts after this change. If there's some separate change that makes scamming-without-checkmark much harder, that's fine, but you can do that without $8/mo verification, and $8/mo verification doesn't make that any easier or harder

I believe the theory is that once bluechecks are common, anyone without them will be more suspicious. Musk also mentions that bluechecks get priority in ranking, meaning unverified EloonMuskCryptoGiveaway is buried way down in the replies.

That really does not make sense. I use twitter a lot, and most of the people I follow do not have checkmarks, and none of them are going to buy it because they are just people who use twitter for fun or on breaks from work or w/e. Random repliers in comments sections still aren't gonna buy the checkmark. And there are already parts of twitter where most people are verified and have a lot of followers ... and they still get piled with scams replying to their comments.

I believe the theory is that once bluechecks are common, anyone without them will be more suspicious

Can you draw out a specific scenario here - what part of twitter, in reply to what accounts, where the scammers are currently using unverified accounts successfully but won't be able to anymore because most users will have bluechecks, as they are more common, so the scammers will stand out? I can't think of a single section of twitter where that will happen. Either all the big people already have checkmarks and their followers do not (and that will either not change or nobody will have checkmarks because people won't pay 100/year for it), or none of the posters or repliers have checkmarks, and that will not change.

Like, "8/mo bluecheck prevents spam" doesn't make sense, at all. Do people just believe it because musk says it will? Do they assume he figured it out?

I didn't say I think it will necessarily work, I was just laying out my best guess as to theory. The specific theory:

General use case:

  1. Verification is easy to get, so people get used to seeing bluechecks next to @joespizzastamfordct, @marietoplessnerd, etc.

  2. !!@! Elon Musk Cr1pt0 Giveaway !!@! doesn't have a bluecheck.

  3. People more likely to spot the scam due to lack of a bluecheck.

This is a plausible use case and hardly unprecedented. Companies with real money on the line (read: financial institutions who take losses for scams their customers fall for) put significant effort into educating customers to distinguish between real calls and scams.

In the replies use case:

  1. Elon Musk tweets "journalists often lie".

  2. 5,000 people reply including Jason Calcanis, Kanye West, Taylor Lorenz, Aella and the real Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee are at the top since they are verified.

  3. Regular guy decides to read the replies and actively scrolldown to even see the crypto scammer.

I have no idea if this will work, but there are clear mechanisms by which it can work.

Of course, I also think it's plausible that Musk is doing it merely to inflate away the value of journalist's favorite status symbol. Now Taylor Lorenz is no more special than Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee.

Yeah, but the median twitter user, even the median twitter user with 50k followers, aren't gonna spend $8/month for the checkmark (although if they did, twitter would get a new massive revenue stream), so it won't have that effect

More comments

this would be true if it was $8 to create any twitter account. Even a tiny nominal fee of $.1 to register a twitter account would probably reduce the spam overall considerably. But $8 to give an ordinary account into one that has special privileges is a good deal.

This is why I unironically think block chain verified accounts that have a negligible one time minting fee to prevent spammers is eventually going to be a big deal.

That makes no sense. If it's not a good deal to get a basic account at $1, let alone $8, then how is it a good deal to spend $8 just to get some minor privileges?

they are not minor though. were talking verification-level privileges. ppl pay $1k or more for this. I think though it will not have all the privileges. But just having your comments rank high and not be put in the spam filter is a major benefit. Worth more than $8 if you have a small business and just need the extra visibility (way cheaper than advertising, which can easily cost $1 per click).

You said (I haven't read myself because Twitter delenda est) that the benefits are:

  • Priority in replies

  • Priority in mentions

  • Priority in search

Those are pretty minor benefits. I sincerely doubt that a scammer will get more than 8x as much value from those as from a normal account (which is what it would mean for them to be willing to pay $8 for verification but unwilling to pay $1 for a normal account). There is also no mention of being immune to spam filters in what you listed there, so unless you forgot to mention it in your OP I'm not sure where that is coming from.

And perhaps people did pay $1000 or more for verified accounts before. Honestly I would never have believed people were that retarded, but I'll take your word for it. But you seem to be assuming that it's because being verified had some great practical benefit. That doesn't seem right to me. Having a verified account (until now at least) was a status symbol. People will pay absurd amount of money for all kinds of status symbols, that doesn't therefore mean they derive material benefit from them. It means people are vain and will do stupid shit to seek status.

Honestly I would never have believed people were that retarded, but I'll take your word for it. But you seem to be assuming that it's because being verified had some great practical benefit.

It's not uncommon for crypto scammers impersonating Musk or some other famous person to make thousands of dollars with a crypto scam using a verified account, hence why they pay $1k for it. A tweet by Musk not uncommonly gets 40k+ comment replies, only 200 at a time can shown, and replies by verified accounts have priority over the non-verified ones and are not buried. For someone promoting a scam that can net thousands of dollars easily, this is worth it.

One issue is that Twitter has a weird combination of real name and username culture, and this is a definite nudge in the direction of more real name culture on Twitter. Facebook is regularly cited as evidence that real names don't prevent abuse, but they do scare off users only willing to contribute (pseudo-)anonymously. This is, of course, a recurring argument on the design of social networks.

Yeah - most bluechecks won't buy the paid version, and the meme value of having an epic blue checkmark will wear off after the first year or two, so even if the numbers look good initially i can't see it staying. None of the other benefits (half the ads?) seem particularly appealing.

Comparing this to total revenue does not make much sense. Instead, you need to look at the profit margin on this incremental revenue.

How much extra does it cost to run this paid checkmark scheme vs not running it? If, for example, operating margin of this individual program is, say, 50% (and this is in my mind underestimate, given that they already implemented the check feature, and the anti spam and prioritizing feature is extension of the rating and recommendation system they already built anyway), that $400M in revenue is $200M in additional profit, which would increase their operating profit by something like 80%. That’s a huge increase in profit on equity.

One must always be thinking in the marginal terms. Given your finance background, I was rather surprised by your comment.

This is true, but on the flip side one must also consider the cost in distraction for decision makers + potential liability. Most tech companies do. A tiny side business might be profitable, but many big companies will shut it down anyway simply because it's a distraction from their main business.

My strong suspicion is that this is just about inflating away the value of journalist's special badge of coolness and exclusivity.

Most scam accounts aren't anywhere close to being massively profitable. Most eke out a living on the margins through casting very wide nets. Any of them that get too successful get beheaded before long. An $8 up front charge would be a fairly effective at preventing spammers from using the system. If too many get through, they could simply switch to demanding X amount of months of payment up front, further increasing the penalty for spammers that get caught.

On the overall topic, I'm glad Musk is bringing reform, as Twitter has a notoriously opaque and arbitrary policy for granting the coveted blue checkmarks. However, $8 is quite a bit for random Twitter users, and it could fracture the platform further between the obsessives who spend half their life on Twitter and those who just use it more casually. Reporters will also lose their privileged status, so expect plenty of news articles framing any changes in a maximally negative light.

Most scam accounts aren't anywhere close to being massively profitable. Any of them that get too successful get beheaded before long. An $8 up front charge would be a fairly effective at preventing spammers from using the system.

crypto changes everything. It makes scams way more profitable. Crypto is fuckign huge. Pre-crypto, scammers pushed pills , poker, credit cards. The market size of crypto is $1.5 trillion. BY comparison, the worldwide gambling industry is just $230 billion. it's more likely someone has a coinbase or binance account and trades crypto compared to a gambling account or plays the casino. Not only that, but people have much more money in crypto than they spend on gambling or on prescription drugs; we're talking 401k sums of money, not weekend at Vegas chump change money. Part of the reason scammers diversified into BEC fraud is because the other sources stopped being as profitable, whereas business accounts have hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions. Crypto is like that in terms of $ but ordinary people, so way more targets and easier.

The value of verified accounts is they rank higher than other type of accounts and convey authority. That is why people pay so much for them, scammers and non-scammers alike. And although they are policed, you need a much threshold for complaints to get a verified account removed comparted to a non verified one. I think only a human can disable a verified account.

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