> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. The sad truth is that the vast majority of

> The author presents no evidence of these accounts being bots other than them being closely connected and cliquey. The sad truth is that the vast majority of bots are extremely unsophisticated, they don't even try to hide their IP address through a proxy server, and basic tools like Google Analytics can identify this. In Google Analytics, just find the "Network" section, and see how much of your traffic is from "amazon web services", and just block all of it. It may not block sophisticated scrapers, and it could potentially harm legitimate users (e.g., amazon based VPN services), but it's amazing how much "bot" traffic is identifiable. The only real bot traffic that's hard to identify are actual people with machines that have been compromised.