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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Pretty remarkable how easy it is to click your way to an insane spammer. For example the #1 inbound to Kamala Harris is some account with no followers or mentions, recently joined, posted the same reply to 600 different threads all on October 16th, liked all of its own posts, and has been dormant since.

Not exactly a great contribution to the discourse.

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Meanwhile I have a Twitter bot which only replies to direct @ mentions, with 3000+ followers, and it gets shadowbanned on a monthly basis, hiding the bot's reply not only from random viewers, but even from the very person who is tweeting @ my bot and also follows my bot...

And they somehow claim that they don't "shadowban" [0]. What a joke. Worst part is that since you're not actually banned, there's literally no recourse or support you can get either.

But then these new accounts with no followers can spam thousands of tweets to big accounts and get away with it? Very strange.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

It's been almost a decade from when I remember first clicking through an account exactly like this.

Twitter has shown they absolutely care not for the discourse.

Long term, platforms that do well on this front will overtake FB/Tw, because real users don't want this garbage.

How is that not automatically detected?

Is there any evidence of any sort that any attempt to thwart things like this has even been attempted?

It is easily detected. Neither Twitter nor FB have any (edit: typo) desire to remedy this. These bots are what keep the discourse going.

If they can omit explicit porn results from searches in real time for people who aren't logged in, they absolutely can automatically detect and shadowban obvious malfeasance like this. The question you have to ask yourself is why they don't.

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