How to spot a Twitter bot

Bot accounts are a persistent problem on Twitter, where they can be used to spam out

favorable news stories and influence politics more broadly. But as companies and third-party groups have tried to push back against bot campaigns, simply identifying the accounts has proven remarkably difficult. A new system called the Botometer, built by researchers at Indiana University and Northeastern University, is the perfect example of why. The system looks at over 1,000 factors, ranging from the tweets themselves (including metadata on how and where they were posted) to the composition of followers. “We are using a wide range of signals to compute scores,” said Onur Varel, a Northeastern University researcher who worked on the project. “Depending on user behavior, different feature types might be revealing.” The early results have been alarming. When I ran some accounts earlier this week, I came away with a 27 percent score — while our esteemed editor-in-chief weighed in at 40 percent. That’s just 3 percent lower than @Arguetron, Sarah Nyberg’s infamous counter-troll bot. (Nilay’s score has come down in the days since, presumably the result of more humane and emotional tweeting.)                                                                                          https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/13/16125852/identify-twitter-bot-botometer-spambot-program