This Algorithm Tells You Whether A Twitter Account Is a Spam Bot

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Back in 2011, a team from Texas A&M University carried out a cyber sting to trap nonhuman Twitter users that were polluting the Twittersphere with spam. Their approach was to set up “honeypot” accounts which posted nonsensical content that no human user would ever be interested in. Any account that retweeted this content, or friended the owner, must surely be a nonhuman user known as a social bot.

The team set up 60 honeypots and harvested some 36,000 potential social bot accounts. The result surprised many observers because of the sheer number of nonhuman accounts that were active. These bots were generally unsophisticated and simply retweeted more or less any content they came across. Read more...

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from MashableMIT Technology Review