You Can Join the Effort to Expose Twitter Bots

Our Botometer app then detects how likely it is that elements of the online discussion are being coordinated by a group of automated accounts. Rather than reflecting an authentic discourse of real people, these accounts may in fact be controlled by a person or an organization. These accounts usually act together, with some of them tweeting propaganda or disinformation, and others agreeing and retweeting, forming an inauthentic discourse around them to attract attention and draw real people into the online discussion.

BotSlayer brings all the pieces together, letting a person using it do all those analyses with the entire flow of Twitter traffic.

BotSlayer’s system collects all matching tweets – not just a sample – and saves them in a database for any retrospective investigation. Its web interface, in one screen, shows users in real time the terms and keywords that are part of suspicious activity around their interests. Users can click on icons to search for related information on various websites and social media platforms to look for related malicious efforts elsewhere online.

For example, during the 2018 U.S. midterm election, many bot accounts that were reported on Twitter were also found to be related to Facebook bot accounts with similar profiles.

BotSlayer also provides links to our Hoaxy system, which shows how Twitter accounts interact over time, identifying which accounts are the most influential, and most likely to be spreading disinformation.

Proving Useful Already
On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.

They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.

When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.

Plenty of Other Uses
Other coordinated campaigns have promoted financial scams, often seeking to sell questionable investments in cryptocurrencies. Scammers have impersonated internet celebrities like entrepreneur Elon Musk or software magnate John McAfee.

These accounts are a bit more sophisticated than political-attack bots, with one lead account typically announcing that users can multiply their riches by transferring some of their cryptocurrency into the scammer’s digital wallet. Then other accounts retweet that announcement, in an effort to make the scheme seem legitimate. At times they reply with doctored screenshots claiming to show that the scheme works.

So far, several news, political and civic organizations have tested BotSlayer. They have been able to identify large numbers of accounts that publish hyperpolitical content at a superhuman pace.

The feedback from testers has helped us make the system more robust, powerful and user-friendly.

As our research advances, we will continue to improve on the system, fixing software bugs and adding new features. In the end, we hope that BotSlayer will become a sort of do-it-yourself toolkit enabling journalists and citizens worldwide to expose and combat inauthentic campaigns in social media.

Pik-Mai Hui is Ph.D. Student in Informatics and Network Science, Indiana University. Christopher Torres-Lugo is Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, Indiana University. This articleis published courtesy of The Conversation.