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I just ran my own Twitter account through the so called 'Botometer' used to form the conclusion of the article. Apparently I'm 4.7/5 bot. Needless to say I did
by krona 6y ago
I just ran my own Twitter account through the so called 'Botometer' used to form the conclusion of the article. Apparently I'm 4.7/5 bot.
Needless to say I didn't finish reading the article.
- jhardy54 6y agoWhat kinds of things do you post about?
- ratsmack 6y agoI have never had a Twitter account, so unfortunately I cannot do the same. I'm hoping more people here do the same as you so we can get a cross section of the accuracy for that specific bot detector. I have problems with articles on both sides of the issue using all kinds of speculation and innuendo to try and discredit the opposite side. I would rather just read articles that cover studies explaining results (data) and methods used to support their position.
- styluss 6y agoCurious if you get a similar result with BotSentinel https://botsentinel.com/ https://botsentinel.com/ NB: not affiliated with Bot Sentinel
- blakesterz 6y agoI tried both this and the other and I am happy to say I am not a bot on either. I did get a .7 on the other and a 0 on this one. Interestingly it identified my sister in law as a bot, but looking at her account, I'd assume the same. Anyone else I checked seemed accurate as well.
- jacquesm 6y agoThe Stepford Wives...
- delecti 6y agoI ran my account through it and got a 0.0 rating, and ran it against my followers, and got similarly low scores for the accounts that I know to be real people (the highest score for a follower I know to be a person was 0.8). I saw higher scores for either accounts that followed me out of nowhere (I'm not interesting enough to draw real strangers), or for accounts that are run as public profiles (an artist with a public account for their comics). I'm inclined to assume that you likely have either atypical or impersonal twitter habits.
- jacquesm 6y agoOr maybe that's just buggy software.
- freeone3000 6y agoIt's not buggy: it detects patterns like the majority of posts being retweets instead of new posts; any new post consisting of an image and accompanying text instead of a message or thread; replies being short comments on top responses to popular posts; and a high degree of connectivity to other accounts that are likely bots. False positives are generally curated accounts, corporate accounts, and government accounts (which are really bots with their software in managerial documents); porn accounts; and people who reblog the news but don't really "use" twitter.
- jacquesm 6y agoDon't feel too bad, I'm 3.9/5. Must go in for service now.
- akvadrako 6y agoI only get a 1/5 and almost all my followers are bots or abandoned accounts I paid for years ago. Same things with BotSentinel - it's just garbage.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoBut... you are not a bot. So the result is arguably right?
- akvadrako 6y agoIf it was really good, then yes it's technically correct. But I suspect it just has no idea.
- baud147258 6y agoWhat I don't get is why they need to access my account to check public tweets from another account.
- throwawaybutwhy 6y agoTo run more Twitter bots, perhaps? (to counteract climate disinformation with the absolute climate truth and science-based conclusions, of course)
- mgoblu3 6y agoMost of these things just use it for API access, from what I’ve gathered. Haven’t looked into this one specifically.
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y agoHave you ever injured a human being or, through inaction, allowed a human being to be harmed?
- eplanit 6y agoWhile walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Zuider 6y agoThe article is distinctly Orwellian. I am a climate skeptic and have participated in such discussions, and found that my bot-rating is very high. Other people whom I know by reputation and online presence elsewhere are also categorized as not being actual humans. Along with this, there is the pre-emptive and dogmatic assertion without proof or serious argument that any disagreement with official dogma must necessary be deliberate 'disinformation' spread by those with an immoral vested interest in spreading falsehood.
- gweinberg 6y agoSo the correct conclusion is not necessarily that most climate change skeptics are bots, but rather that climate change skeptics are likely to be characterized by the software as bots. I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot?
- Zuider 6y ago>So the correct conclusion is not necessarily that most climate change skeptics are bots, but rather that climate change skeptics are likely to be characterized by the software as bots. Yes, that is as much as we can deduce from the data presented in the paper, given that they apparently just took the 'Botometer' verdicts at face value without taking the extra steps to see if they were indeed accurate. It may, of course, be absolutely true that the 'denier' accounts are just scripts, but further investigation is necessary to establish this. > I wonder what else makes you more likely to be characterized as a bot? That would best be established by examining the bot-detector's algorithm. Another commenter on this thread noted that he received a high rating based on the fact that he rarely logged into his account.
- gnarbarian 6y agoSo now we'll see twitter ban this bot because it "dehumanizes" a large group of people like the NPC meme right?
- vegetablepotpie 6y agoI listened to the drilled podcast two weeks ago and season 3 was very eye opening to me because they did an in depth look at how corporate PR has evolved to influence public opinion in very subtle and powerful ways. We’re talking oil companies setting up contracts the size of $25 million to influence opinion on single issues and they work with psychologists to take advantage of the shortcomings inherent in our minds. The result is that in 2021 people tell me things that influence their opinions that are either misleading, out of date or absolutely false. We’re talking things like climategate or that volcanoes give off more co2 than all of human civilization. I’m just a regular person, I don’t believe in climate change, I’ve researched it, it’s something I’m concerned about. A million dollar PR campaign against me and my friends, family and coworkers is not something anyone can standup against. The dogma that you perceive comes from people reacting to dissatisfaction from an important issue that isn’t being taken seriously. We are citizens, regular people, against what amounts to artificial intelligences that are maximizing the number of paper clips they produce. David and Goliath doesn’t come close to the situation we’re up against.
- missedthecue 6y agoYeah they gave me a 4.1/5 on account of not being active enough. Their method is sketchy for sure.
- gsich 6y agoI don't know what the Botometer does, but it labeled my clear as hell bot account (automatic posting of started games in a computer game) as human. Also I found no output of applications that were used to send a tweet. Most bots can easily detected by that. Mine also.
- Berobero 6y agoA ML model giving a single false positive is generally uninteresting and meaningless in evaluating its overall performance. Also, note that the details clearly state that, even for high bot scores, some non-trivial percentage of examples in their training data were still labeled as human. As an aside, for those interested, the GitHub page for the tool's Python API (https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python) lists relevant papers regarding the functioning/design of the tool.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoI ran my account through both Botometer and Bot Sentinel. Got 0.4/5 on Botometer, and 0% on Bot Sentinel. Kind of annoyed that Botometer requires me to authorize it to access my Twitter account, when all my tweets are public (and who cares about bots that make private tweets, if that's even a thing). Bot Sentinel didn't require this. https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ https://botsentinel.com/ https://botsentinel.com/
- pjc50 6y agoThat was interesting: I tried https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ , and got a score of 0.2. I then asked it to look at my followers and it spotted several obvious spam followers, and correctly identified some "quote of the day" accounts as bots.
- dlkinney 6y agoI follow a (very) wide spectrum of accounts on Twitter and the following seemed true for the accounts I follow which scored highly likely to be bots: - it's 50/50 accurate picking actual bots I know I follow - the more simple the reading level, the higher it scored - however, extremely heady accounts also score high - the farther right/left the account goes seems to up the score a little - accounts that quote authors frequently score very high, even if they're human behind them - everything from Chinese state media scored higher than anything - everything that was frequently highly critical of China scored extremely high - most Trumpers and Antifa I follow had very low scores (but most are high-up/origin accounts) - most news organizations from both sides scored middle range, including known propagandists and "reputable" organizations - accounts from both sides of the COVID discussion were mostly low Hard to say, but my best guess is "low effort" is the defining factor. Only exception is the pro/anti-Chinese stuff, which is definitely a mix of real people and bots. I keep pretty good tabs on the accounts I follow and I think I'm pretty good at determining who is "a real person with real feelings saying real things they really think" and bots, and from this analysis, I have zero faith that this tool has any modicum of reliability in a research setting. I think it's possibly accurate enough to say "yes, this is definitely a human", but totally fails to identify bots. Thus, any research that uses this tool as a measure of bot influence is way off, because there are way too many false positives. Which I guess is a good thing for anyone who wants to say, "look at all these people being suckered by all these bots!" which is pretty unscrupulous. YMMV