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How to Identify Twitter Bots – Guide
Twitter now flags automated profiles that tweet useful information like COVID-19 updates, earthquake alerts, etc. by adding a robotic header field to the profile. This new feature will help users distinguish between “good” bot accounts and human accounts. Twitter defines “good bots” as automated accounts that “help people find useful, fun and relevant information every day – from sharing COVID-19 updates to notifying people of traffic updates and helping them find internships. “There’s a whole community of developers working hard to build really useful and interesting bots,” Twitter said in its press release.
Twitter bots can be used for useful purposes, for example B. to broadcast important content such as weather emergencies in real-time, share informational content in bulk, and generate automatic responses through direct messages. Twitter bots can also be designed for malicious purposes of intimidation and platform manipulation – such as: B. Distributing fake news campaigns, spamming, violating third-party privacy, and sock puppets. like spreading fake news campaigns, spam, violating other people’s privacy and sock puppets.
How to Identify Twitter bots
Beware of Fake Account Names
The easiest way to filter out Twitterverse bots is through their usernames, which may not match their identity or role. You can easily guess that a username instinctively belongs to a human person; they would seem considerate being a bot. The username may contain many symbols, numbers or misspelled names to reveal your identity.
There are also times when the username and profile picture used by Twitter bots are not related to the same person. For example, the username @alfredhitchcock tells you that the person using the Twitter account must be a man, but the profile picture sings a different song as it belongs to a woman. These accounts try to maintain anonymity, but a simple mistake is enough to make me laugh every time.
Detect duplicate profile pictures
This should be one of the first steps you should take to assess the authenticity of a Twitter profile. As the number of bots on the platform is very high, there is a possibility that people who create bots will reuse their profile or cover photos to save time and spread more spam profiles.
However, if you right-click on any of the images and do a reverse google image search (via images.google.com), you may find multiple profiles linked to the same image. You may need to copy or save the image’s URL and submit it to Google to see all matching results. From this, you can confidently conclude that the account you found is a bot and that it is part of a larger botnet.
View Twitter account activity
In terms of indicators, the activity of a Twitter account follows alongside the username and profile picture. There can be one of two scenarios. Either the bot was activated recently and sent a single tweet with high engagement numbers, or the bot sent a large number of tweets in a very small time window. You can calculate any Twitter user’s account activity by dividing the number of tweets by the number of active days on the platform. You can check the user’s joining date by hovering over the ‘month/year’ tag joined in the profile.
There are a variety of benchmarks for deciding whether an account is bot driven. However, if the activity varies between 50 and 75 tweets per day, it is considered suspicious. It can be flagged as highly suspicious when the number of tweets per day exceeds 144, an unusual pattern for human users. The bot account shown above shows an activity of around 59 tweets per day. Also, there are times when you get an almost real tweet and it’s enough to go through the sender’s profile. Then you realize the sender was a bot because they tweeted the same information to every user on the platform.
Ideally, spambots should be difficult to catch on any platform, be it Twitter, but we can identify them for the sake of time and money. It is common for spam bots to post the same tweet on all your accounts in a strategy that reveals the secret of your identity.
Hence the concept of semantic similarity which means ______________ You should look at all tweets (about a topic) that were sent in a very short time, say 15-20 minutes. Highlight contextually similar tweets. Most Twitter accounts that appear up after this process they can be considered as spammers and be blocked by the microblogging platform in the long run. You can take the examples of Jio or President Trump to see the spam that has come to Twitter in the recent past.
Twitter’s responsibility
Twitter already has a set of rules against automation, which means they will suspend or delete your account if you violate or abuse their APIs. They are not allowed to send unsolicited messages or hateful tweets to anyone, but there is a lack of verification to determine who should and should not be banned. Twitter’s lack of attention to this issue has created a cesspool of spambots that are now wreaking havoc on the platform. They conveniently spread false information and trick the masses into believing what they really want.
While Twitter has started to implement new bot screening and blocking policies on its platform, there is still a long way to go. He has already made policy changes that protect you from cyberbullying and hate speech and give users even more power to report users and help improve the microblogging platform. It’s about time Twitter laid the groundwork to stop the bots or it will damage the credibility of the news-centric platform it’s been trying to become for the past year.
Final note
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