[cratermoon]

"Instagram is actually pretty hostile to security researchers studying their platform. ... Which is unfortunate because Instagram is one of the platforms most useful to bad actors."

Hmm, perhaps those two facts are more related than Belotti's wording suggests.

[ren_engineer]

this, social media platforms really have minimal incentive to ban bots until it starts hurting their bottom line.

[rbanffy]

I liked to assume destabilising democracies would hurt their bottom line, but reality seems to be the opposite.

[Nextgrid]

It isn't until we have proper laws against that, and politicians themselves use these platforms to further their own agenda (if not spread outright misinformation) so it's unlikely to happen. Plus with the control that these platforms nowadays have on public discourse it's likely that any attempt at such a law will have public opinion swayed against it immediately.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I wonder if their thought-process is "if we don't, someone else will". But the fact that Gab, Parlor, et al. haven't gotten significant traction, I think, is proof against that.

[rbanffy]

Gab preaches to the choir - everyone there is already gone. Parler seems to be something between catastrophe and fraud against its investors.

They don’t differentiate from the dominant players enough to be considered categories on their own, the audience already has the desired views, and they aggressively moderate against conflicting discourse.

Parler was incredibly useful for uncovering the January 6th attack, however.

Eventually some service will take over Facebook and Twitter, but I doubt that it’ll be something that’s so targeted to the far-right.

[nfRfqX5n]

kind of. it doesn't look good when all of the top comments on a famous person's posts are all bot spam.

[hattmall]

Only if people recognize it as such though

[at-fates-hands]

This is true.

Back when I was still on Twitter, I remember folks in the office were having a game to see who had the most bots following them. I guess there was some online form that evaluated the people following you and determined if they were real or not.

I'm sure bots have gotten much better at avoiding detection, but it would be interesting to see if these programs could still ferret them out as real or fake. Likewise, to your point, it would be interesting if the users themselves could tell either.

[ufmace]

Maybe also related, I've also found Instagram to be the easiest service to create extra accounts on. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc all demand phone numbers to create an account, if not immediately than within minutes of opening. They're all set up to make it as hard as possible to use any kind of fake phone number. And all quick on the trigger to ban new accounts if anything looks the least bit odd, or require even more elaborate confirmation and security.

Instagram meanwhile seems to be, just give it an email on any service and a password, and poof you've got a new account. Post away with anything you want, follow and DM anyone, and no bans, locks, or requests for more info. Maybe they'll lock you out if you misbehave enough, but it seems to be actually hard to hit any limits like that without actually doing something they don't like.

[herbst]

Not sure what I do differently. But I do get banned after a few minutes making an Instagram account without phone or Facebook verification.

Not to mention that Instagram is useless for business of not linked to a Facebook acc.

[gccs]

I can't even create an Instagram account with my home IP and real phone number. It says something about suspicious activity...