CybersecurityYou Can Join the Effort to Expose Twitter Bots

By Pik-Mai Hui and Christopher Torres-Lugo

Published 28 November 2019

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.

It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.

One focus of our work has been to devise ways to identify inauthentic accounts being run with the help of software, rather than by individual humans. We also develop maps of how online misinformation spreads among people and how it competes with reliable information sources across social media sites.

However, we have also noticed that journalists, political campaigns, small businesses and even the public at large may have a better sense than we do of what online discussions are most likely to attract the attention of those who control automated propaganda systems.

We receive many requests from individuals and organizations who need help collecting and analyzing social media data. That is why, as a public service, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns.

Combining Different Tools
Many of our tools allow users to retrospectively query and examine our collection of a 10% random sample of all Twitter traffic over a long period of time. A user can specify keywords, hashtags, user mentions, locations or user accounts they’re interested in. Our software then collects the matching tweets and looks more deeply at their content by extracting links, hashtags, images, movies, phrases and usernames those tweets contain.

Our trend analysis app looks at how closely that suspicious content trends together. Our network analysis app shows how ideas spread from user to user. Our map app checks the geographical pattern of suspicious activities around important topics.