The bot issue on Twitter is real and very obvious. The microblogging platform has been flooded with bots for quite some time now and it’s getting really hard to escape their clutches. If you’re a regular Twitter user, there have been times when you’ve come across a spambot spreading information wildly. Bots are often used to spread fake news and political propaganda, which is currently seen as Twitter’s biggest problem. However, you can still try to stay away from bots by identifying your Twitter account on the platform.
Tips for Knowing Twitter Bots
There is no defined method you can adopt to identify bots on Twitter, but here are a few tips to keep in mind when using the microblogging platform to be aware of their existence. These will help you avoid interacting with them, clicking on malicious links and blocking them if necessary.
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Beware of Fake Account Names
The easiest way to filter bots from the Twitterverse is usernames that don’t match their identity or the function they serve. You can easily guess intuitively that a username belongs to a human.as they seem thought, if a bot username may contain too many symbols, numbers or fake namesreveal their identities.
There are times when it is. The username and profile picture used by Twitter bots are not related to the same person. For example, the username @alfredhitchcock says that the person using the Twitter account in question must be a man, but it sings a different melody because the profile picture belongs to a woman. These accounts try to maintain their anonymity but a simple stupidity is all it takes to make me laugh every time.
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Detect Duplicate Profile Pictures
This should be one of the first steps you need to take to assess the authenticity of a profile on Twitter. Because the number of bots on the platform is too large, bot creators reuse their profiles or cover images to save time and distribute more spam profiles.
However, if Right click on one of the 2 images and do a reverse Google image search (via images.google.com), you can find multiple profiles linked to the same picture. You may need to copy the URL of the image or save the same and then upload it to Google to see all matching results. So you can tell for sure that the account you stumbled upon is a bot and is part of a larger bot network.
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Direct Reply in Seconds Without Tweeting
There are numerous types of bots deployed on Twitter to spam your account, but the easiest to spot is the on-topic spam bot. This Activates almost instantly when you post tweets on a specific topic. The bot can follow you, reply to your tweet or add you to their Twitter list and lure you to follow them.
No human can read the content (or link) and reply to your tweet within milliseconds of posting. This indicates that the response or follow-up is automated and no human involved in the process. IT helps you weed out unwanted accounts from your social profile while protecting your privacy.
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Check out Twitter Account Activity
In terms of indicators, a Twitter account’s activity is placed next to its username and profile picture. It could be one of two scenarios. Either the bot was recently activated and sent a single tweet with high engagement numbers, or the bot sent a large number of tweets in a fairly small timeframe.
You can do Calculate any Twitter user’s account activity by dividing the number of tweets by the number of days active on the platform. You can check the user’s join date by hovering over it. ‘month/year’ joined tag under profile.
There are several criteria for deciding whether an account is bot controlled. However, if the activity ranges from 50-75 tweets per day, it is considered suspicious. it’s possible If the number of tweets per day exceeds 144 is labeled as highly suspicious, this is a rare pattern for human users. The bot account shown above shows an activity of around 59 tweets per day.
Additionally, from time to time just get an almost real looking tweet and send it by looking at the sender’s profile. Then you realize that the sender is a bot because it tweets the same information to every user on the platform.
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Check ‘Bot Score’ of Twitter Account
As social media has become a core element of our society, researchers are now working on ways to make it easier to identify bots on Twitter. Researchers at Indiana and Northeastern University have developed a new tool called botometer, which tells the probability of a Twitter user be a bot. It is difficult to set an absolute threshold percentage for detecting bots, but the closer the score is to 100%, the more likely the account is to be a bot.
Here are two screenshots, one showing my Twitter account’s bot rating (30%) and the other an online news spambot’s bot rating (58%). this The tool uses a wide variety of signals such as user behavior, emotional content.and other property types to set the rating. However, it is not always true.
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Semantic Similarity (Common Content)
Ideally, it should be difficult to catch spam bots on any platform, be it Twitter, but we are able to detect them due to time and money constraints. This it’s common to see spambots posting the same tweetsas part of some strategy, he is giving away their identity on all his accounts.
This gives rise to the concept semantic similaritythis means you should see all tweets (about a subject) sent soonLet’s say 15-20 minutes, to separate contextually similar tweets. Most Twitter accounts that emerge after this process can be seen as spammers and blocked by the microblogging platform in the long run. You can take the examples of Jio or President Trump to notice spam coming to Twitter in the recent past.
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Beware of Twitter Botnets
Spamming bot accounts do not work alone. A collection of these bot accounts is said to be controlled by a spammer. Announce everything using this automated network of Twitter accounts. You should be wary of spam accounts, because they spreading malicious links and false newsmay result in voicing a false opinion on the subject without considering all the necessary facts. Bots can also be used to trend any topic and spread hate speech on the platform, which is not the purpose of Twitter’s clear format. You can check if you are chatting with the propaganda bot on Twitter. botcheck.me tool.
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Expanding Content
This is probably the worst consequence of the existence of bots on Twitter. The spammer knows tweet a political message or factual false news from one of the bot accounts Spread like crazy on the platform with companion bot accounts. You’ll notice that the odd tweet on the bot account gets more likes and retweets than most influencers on the platform.
This activity from spambots caused the spread of politically incorrect information and other angry messages It’s on Twitter, which is currently seen as the biggest issue with the platform. It is due to the openness of the platform that the bots run freely without any checks and balances.
Twitter’s Responsibility
Twitter has a set of rules already defined against automation; that means if you violate or abuse their API they will ban or delete your account. You’re not even allowed to send spam texts or hateful tweets to anyone, but the controls on who can and cannot be banned are missing. Twitter’s lack of attention to this issue has spawned a spambot dump that is currently raging. on the platform. They are appropriately spreading misinformation, making the masses believe they really want it.
While Twitter has started to implement new policies to weed out and block bots on its platform, it still has a long way to go. It has already made changes to policies that prevent you from cyberbullying, hate speech, and giving users more authority to report them, and helping to improve the microblogging platform. It’s time for Twitter to lay the groundwork to stop bots otherwise it will affect the credibility of the news-driven platform it sought to become last year.
SEE ALSO: Top 15 Twitter Tips and Tricks You Should Know
Identify Bots on Twitter, Stop Spam!
It is currently unknown how long it will take Twitter to implement new policies and act on these policies to circumvent spam bots on its microblogging platform. However, if the public can learn to distinguish between real and bot Twitter accounts, influencing the public will certainly not be easy. This will help reduce the spread of misinformation as well as political propaganda that can affect the outcome of any real-world event. What do you think of spam bots on Twitter? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
