I'm not associated with the Bot Sentinel project, but I think one of their major strengths is how they communicate their results. See the description for "disru

I'm not associated with the Bot Sentinel project, but I think one of their major strengths is how they communicate their results. See the description for "disruptive" accounts, the class before "problematic": > Accounts that are classified as disruptive, often engage in malicious tweet activity. Some disruptive accounts harass other accounts and use offensive language. Disruptive accounts periodically share misinformation and can frequently spam hashtags. Inauthentic accounts and toxic trolls regularly receive a disruptive rating, so we recommend you exhibit caution when interacting with disruptive accounts. And from their FAQ > I am a human being, so why am I rated disruptive or problematic? > Bot Sentinel doesn’t just classify bots, we developed Bot Sentinel to classify several types of accounts including accounts operated by human beings. All this to say, a great effort is made to ensure people understand that what is being classified is behaviour, not human-ness. To your point re: "...social bot claims are insidious because they're invariably assertions of political or geopolitical conspiracy. Surely, many humans behind accounts classified as "disruptive" or "problematic" are statistically not going to be physically in some warehouse or being paid as part of some state-sponsored psy-op. But it's hard to extricate the political and propagandist nature of groups of, often loosely coordinated, individuals who consistently and totally disrupt non-political discussion with literal thousands of messages. It wouldn't be accepted in any physical public space at the scale and frequency it is done online. > "A spammer already knows they're breaking the rules of the platform..." I would contest this point, and further would say that ignorance of the rules is not much of an excuse. Bans are often preceded by a suspension, which provide users with an explanation of the offending behaviour. I'm not sure how things like Bot Sentinel do anything but educate users on whether their behaviours are disruptive or not. Good faith actors will take that as constructive advice to change, bad faith actors will wear it as a badge of honour. > Binary judgments of who’s a bot or not have real potential to poison our public discourse Bot Sentinel does not claim to identify bots full-stop. I think this is a bit of willful ignorance on Twitter's part. The bit about "the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve" is something I feel is particularly rich, because Twitter is financially incentivised to be themselves "behind the curve" when it comes to moderating behaviour on their platform, as disruptive accounts often drive engagement.