A Twitter user can be a human and still be a spammer, and an account can be operated by a bot and still be benign.
- Zafar Gilani
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used data from Twitter to determine whether bots can be accurately detected, how bots behave, and how they impact Twitter activity.
They divided accounts into categories based on total number of followers, and found that accounts with more than 10 million followers tend to retweet at similar rates to bots. In accounts with fewer followers however, bots tend to retweet far more than humans. These celebrity-level accounts also tweet at roughly the same pace as bots with similar follower numbers, whereas in smaller accounts, bots tweet far more than humans. Their results will be presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) in Sydney, Australia.
Bots, like people, can be malicious or benign. The term ‘bot’ is often associated with spam, offensive content or political infiltration, but many of the most reputable organisations in the world also rely on bots for their social media channels. For example, major news organisations, such as CNN or the BBC, who produce hundreds of pieces of content daily, rely on automation to share the news in the most efficient way. These accounts, while classified as bots, are seen by users as trustworthy sources of information.
“A Twitter user can be a human and still be a spammer, and an account can be operated by a bot and still be benign,” said Zafar Gilani, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, who led the research. “We’re interested in seeing how effectively we can detect automated accounts and what effects they have.”
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Image: Twitter
Credit: Esther Vargas
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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