Jan 24, 2017

Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

On Twitter, bots are accounts that are run remotely by someone who automates the messages they send and activities they carry out. "It is difficult to assess exactly how many Twitter users are bots," said graduate student Juan Echeverria, a computer scientist at UCL, who uncovered the massive networks. His research suggests earlier work to find bots has missed these types of networks because they act differently to the most obvious automated accounts. "Considering all the efforts already there in detecting bots, it is amazing that we can still find so many bots, much more than previous research," Dr Zhou told the BBC. Twitter deserved praise for its work on finding and eliminating bots, he added, but it was clear that skilled hackers had found ways to avoid official scrutiny and keep the bots ticking over. It was hard to know who was behind the collections of fake accounts, said Dr Zhou, although there was evidence that a small percentage of the accounts had been sold or rented as they were now following Twitter users outside the main bot network.

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