The bot problem on Twitter is real and very much evident. The micro-blogging platform has been swarmed with bots for quite a long time and it is becoming really difficult to escape its clutches. If you’re a regular Twitter user, there surely must have been times when you have encountered a spam bot that was spreading information wildly. The bots are usually used to spread fake news stories and political propaganda, which is now being seen as the biggest problem with Twitter at the moment. However, you can still try to keep your Twitter account free of bots by identifying them on the platform.

There is no defined method you can adopt to identify bots on Twitter but here are a handful of pointers you should keep in mind while using the micro-blogging platform to be aware of their presence. These will help you avoid interacting with them, clicking on malicious links, and blocking them if need be.

Look out For Bogus Account Names

The easiest way to filter out bots from amongst the Twitterverse is through the usernames, which may not conform to their identity or the function they serve. You can easily guess that a username belongs to a human by instinct, as they’d look thought out, whereas a bot’s username may contain too many symbols, numbers or fake names, exposing their identity.

  • Detect Duplicacy of Profile Pictures

This should be one of the initial steps that you should perform to judge the authenticity of a profile on Twitter. Since the number of bots on the platform is too high, there is a possibility that the people creating bots are reusing their profile or cover images to save time and deploy more spam profiles.

Detect Duplicacy of Profile Pictures

Direct Response Within Seconds of Tweeting

There are numerous types of bots that’ve been deployed on Twitter to spam your account but the one that’s the easiest to spot is the topic-related spambot. It is activated when you send out tweets related to a certain topic, almost instantly. The bot may follow you, reply to your tweet or add you to their Twitter list, while attracting you to follow them as well.

  • Check out Twitter Account Activity

In terms of indicators, the activity of a Twitter account trails alongside the username and profile picture. There could be one of two scenarios. Either the bot was recently activated and has sent out a single tweet, with high engagement figures or the bot has sent a huge number of tweets in a rather small window of time.

Check out Twitter Account Activity

  • Check ‘Bot Score’ of Twitter Account

Since social media has become a core element of our society, researchers are now working on methods to make it easy to identify bots on Twitter. The researchers at Indiana and Northeastern University has developed a new tool called Botometer, which tells you the likelihood of a Twitter user being a bot. It’s difficult to determine an absolute threshold percentage to detect bots but the closer the score is to 100%, the probability of the account being a bot increases.

Check ‘Bot Score’ of Twitter Account

Semantic Similarity (Common Content)

Ideally, it should be difficult to catch spambots on any platform, be it Twitter, but we can detect them because of time and money constraints. It is common to see spam bots post the same tweets, across all of its accounts as per a part of some strategy, giving away the secret of their identity. Image Courtesy: Fivetooldrinker/Twitter

  • Beware of Twitter Botnets

The spamming bot accounts do not operate singularly. A collection of these bot accounts is said to be controlled by a spammer, who can spread the word about anything by using this network of automated Twitter accounts. You should be cautious of spam accounts as they propagate malicious links and false news, which may result in voicing a wrong opinion on the topic without taking into account all the necessary facts. The bots could also be used to make any topic trend and spread hate speech across the platform, which is not the purpose of the crisp format of Twitter. You can check whether you’re conversing with a propaganda bot on Twitter with the use of the Botcheck.me tool.

Beware of Twitter Botnets

Amplification of Content

This is possibly the worst consequence of the presence of bots on Twitter. The spammer is known to tweet a politically-charged message or factually incorrect news from one of the bot accounts, which is spread around the platform like crazy by companion bot accounts. You’ll notice that the one odd tweet that is present on the bot account has more likes and retweets than most influencers on the platform.

Twitter already has a defined set of rules against automation, which means that it’ll ban or delete your account if you violate or abuse their APIs. You’re even not allowed to send any unsolicited texts or hateful tweets to anyone but there has been a lack of checks to define who should be banned or not. Twitter’s lack of attention towards this problem has resulted in the creation of a cesspool of spambots that are now reeking havoc on the platform. They’re conveniently spreading false info, misleading the masses to believe what they really want.

Though Twitter has started implementing new policies to weed out and block bots on its platform, there is still a long way to go. It has already made changes to the policies that prevent you from cyber-bullying, hate speech and handing even more power to users to report users and help improve the micro-blogging platform. It is high-time Twitter lay out the groundwork to stop bots else it’ll affect the credibility of the news-focused platform it has been trying to become in the past year.