Bot-Detection

Bot Detection in Social Media Accounts: In social media (Facebook, twitter, Instagram) there are multiple bot accounts used by various political parties or organisation for there benefits. Can you develop an algorithm to detect the bot accounts using some of the properties/features of bot accounts? It will help to us to use the data from real accounts in multiple analysis.

What is a bot?

Twitter bots are automated user accounts that interact with Twitter using an application programming interface (API). These bots can be programmed to perform tasks normally associated with human interaction, including follow users, favor tweets, direct message (DM) other users and, most importantly, they can tweet content, and retweet anything posted by a specific set of users or featuring a specific hashtag. Many are used to perform important functions, such as tweet about earthquakes in real-time and serve as part of a warning system. In the case of a campaign, however, political or otherwise, they are normally used to generate mass interest in specific content by spreading messages at a rate that isn’t possible with human users

Creating a Twitter bot

• Apply for a developer account
• Create a Twitter app
• Setup a development environment
• Link your Twitter app and dev environment
• Program the bot
• Test the bot

How do I detect a bot?

Now you know what a bot is, but the bigger question is would you know a bot if you encountered one? Depending on the level of stealth employed by a bot, some are easier to detect than others.

• Some typical characteristics of bots on Twitter include:
• Many Twitter bots have a relatively recent creation date.
• Many bot user names contain numbers, which can indicate automatic name generation.
• The account primarily retweets content, rather than tweeting original content.
• The account’s tweet frequency is higher than a human user could feasibly achieve.
• The account may have a high number of followers and also be following a lot of accounts; conversely, some bot accounts are identifiable because they send a lot of tweets but only have a few followers.
• Many bots tweet the same content as other users at roughly the same time.
• Short replies to other tweets can also indicate automated behavior.
• There is often no biography, or indeed a photo, associated with bot Twitter accounts.

Dependencies

Python 3, Pandas, Numpy, Seaborn, MatplotLib, Sklearn