![]() “There is more awareness around disinformation than ever before, yet there is still little understanding of just how much disinformation there truly is,” wrote the BotSight team in a blog post. To date, BotSight’s users have analyzed over 100,000 Twitter accounts. A separate, random sample indicated about 4% to 8% bot activity by volume, showing that the bots were strategic about their behavior, favoring current events to maximize impact.Īhead of BotSight’s debut, the team says it spent six months scrolling through Twitter with the tool to test, improve, and validate the model. A review of the data set revealed that about 5% of accounts overall were bots, but that between 6% and 18% of accounts tweeting about the pandemic were bots depending on the time period sampled. With all this in mind, the BotSight team trained the model on a 4TB corpus of historical tweets. They also tend to have names containing many numbers and random characters, and they form cliques within which they post identical content. (A perfect AUC is 1.) In its predictions, it considers over 20 factors, including IP-based correlation (accounts that are closely linked geographically), temporal-based correlation (closely linked in time), signs of automation in usernames and handles (and other metadata), social subgraphs, content similarity, Twitter verification status, the rate at which the account is acquiring followers, and account description.īots generally exhibit regularity in their posting habits that ordinary users don’t, according to NortonLifeLock, and they’re generally short-lived. Powering BotSight is an AI model that detects Twitter bots with a high degree of accuracy, achieving an area under curve - a common indicator of model quality - of 0.967 on research data sets. ![]() And it’s these bots that BotSight aims to spotlight - NortonLifeResearchGroup says it found the percentage of bot-originated tweets was as high as 20% when viewing trending topics like “#covid19”. At least a portion of the disinformation dissemination is attributable to bots, which start posts that validate trends or latch onto feeds to sow discord. One French account with over a million followers shared an article implying COVID-19 was artificially created, while a video describing the coronavirus as a “man-made poison” racked up more than 3 million views on YouTube and over 10 million likes, shares, and comments on Facebook. Recent analyses suggest that certain influential social media accounts are amplifying false cures and conspiracy theories. The team behind it says BotSight is intended to highlight the prevalence of bots and disinformation campaigns within users’ feeds, as the spread of pandemic-related misinformation reaches a veritable fever pitch. NortonLifeLock Research Group, the R&D division of antivirus vendor NortonLifeLock, today released a browser extension called BotSight that’s designed to detect potential Twitter bots in real time. We're thrilled to announce the return of GamesBeat Summit Next, hosted in San Francisco this October, where we will explore the theme of "Playing the Edge." Apply to speak here and learn more about sponsorship opportunities here.
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