Accounts that display a sudden spike in activity and then stop posting altogether can also be suspicious. If accounts routinely tweet only on certain days or at certain times, such as at night or between certain hours, this is also a red flag of automation. Journalists and news organisations are likely to post more frequently than other communities, for example, so may appear to be bot-like.Īccounts that primarily retweet or like content from other users rather than tweeting original content can be flagged for signs of automation. You should always think about what kinds of accounts you are looking at in a network or dataset.
First Draft has set a minimum of 100 tweets a day as a general rule for flagging signs of automation. However it is difficult to agree on fixed benchmarks. Pattern of activityĪ high rate of activity is typically the first indicator of inauthenticity. The account shows various signs of possible automation, including a recent creation date, a handle with random numbers, a lack of bio information and no background image. A missing background photo could also be a signal of automation. If in doubt, reverse-image search a user’s profile photo to test its authenticity.
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Or they may include stock photos or random images - cartoon characters, animals, landscapes, TV personalities - instead. Suspicious accounts often don’t include a profile picture. The username may have a generic name followed by numbers, or it may just be a random sequence of numbers. Sometimes inauthentic accounts will include a lot of bland assertions which would be widely accepted in the target society such as “dog lover” or “sports fan”.Ī handle or username that includes random sequences of numbers is suspicious. At the same time, an account with an early creation date (2008-2012) which lays dormant and then exhibits a sudden spike in activity could also be an indicator of automation.Ĭheck whether the user profile lacks information about a real person and instead includes a smattering of hashtags, emojis, URLs and politically divisive or hyper-partisan words. An account or group of accounts that were created recently, such as in the last year or few months, can be used to flag suspicious or bot-like activity. Taken together this list provide signals for anyone to identify bot-like accounts without the need for enormous dataservers, extensive coding skills or machine-learning algorithms.Ī key indicator is the account’s creation date.
If an account ticks ten indicators off the list there is a high likelihood it is inauthentic, although this judgement will always depend on the circumstances. Most of them, in isolation, could be seen as perfectly normal for some social media users.īut the more characteristics an account displays, the more likely it is to be automated or co-ordinated. None of these indicators alone are enough to conclusively say whether an account is a bot, or not. Given the complexity and imprecise nature of detecting bots, trolls, cyborgs, sock puppets or any other types of inauthentic accounts on social media, these metrics are not exhaustive. Read: “The not-so-simple science of social media ‘bots'” Within each category are different metrics which are red flags for automation. The list of indicators is broken down by category: the account’s pattern of activity, account information, content posted by the account, and network of other accounts it may be a part of. And many of these models only apply when the relevant data has been collected, making it difficult for those of us working in breaking news or monitoring online activity in real-time to identify suspicious behaviour with confidence.įrom talking with academics and researchers, studying the work of others, and carrying out our own investigations, First Draft has put together a list of indicators to help anyone identify suspicious online activity. While academics and researchers agree on many of the metrics used to flag automated and co-ordinated online activity, no two models or algorithms are alike. Some rights reserved.īot detection is no simple task. Dial and composite by Ali Abbas Ahmadi/First Draft.