Getting to the bottom of bots

A social media account run by a computer programme.

A group of bots all run by the same person or company, and all programmed to do the same thing. Botnets can have more than 100 000 accounts.

The entity controlling a botnet, with the power to make unpopular accounts or posts look really popular, or to generate so much traffic on a hashtag that it starts to become a trend in its own right, completely artificially.

Professional bot herders employ people to set up social media accounts, then take the account login details and sign the account up to a piece of automation software, either commercial or home-made.

Other bots started out as real accounts run by real users. At some point, the real user stopped using the account, and some time later, a hacker got hold of the account login details and used them to sign it up to a piece of automation software.

Bots like that are harder to spot, because they have a real person’s name and picture, and weren’t all created at the same time. You have to look at their behaviour to see

whether they look real.

Think of the three As: activity, anonymity and amplification.

If an account posts many times every day, doesn’t give any verifiable personal information (such as a profile picture) and only ever posts retweets or likes, it’s behaving like a bot.

If you’re not sure about an account, look at its timeline. If all it’s ever posted is retweets, and especially if those retweets are in lots of different languages and cover lots of themes, it’s probably a bot. – Digital Forensic Research Lab