How to Detect Twitter Bots
With the ever-increasing use of the internet social media on our daily life, a new wave of risks and challenges arose.
One of the of the risks that have rapidly surfaced in the last years is the attempted to shape public opinion by artificially injecting ideas (Fake News or malicious views) or interacting with accounts in such a manner that serves the interest of a specific group. as we’ve seen with the 2016 US Election.
Twitter is one of pillars for political discourse the with around 330 million active user. and according to a recent study almost as much as 48 million account that are likely bots.
So what is an internet bot ?
An internet social bot is an autonomous program which can interact with systems or users and run social accounts in a way that mimics human. It is worthy to point out that not all bots are harmful, some bots are used for automating repetitive tasks like trading bots and web crawling bot.
How to spot a twitter bot ?
There is no defined method you can adopt to identify bots on Twitter but there are some signs that can help you identify bot accounts from legitimate ones:
- Typically a Twitter bots will have a relatively recent creation date.
- A bot account will generally have an account name which is a bunch of numbers and letter which can make no sense and points to an auto generated name rather a guanine name.
- There is often no bio associated with the bot accounts.
- The Account will be tweeting using trending hashtags that might not be within the same context of the tweet itself.
- The account primarily retweets content, rather than tweeting original content.
- The account’s tweet frequency is higher than a human user could feasibly achieve.
Next time you are on twitter keep an eye on these signs and be wary of suspicious accounts. also spread awareness to combat harmful bots.
