Four truths about bots

A recent internal survey of daily people on Twitter across four countries revealed that their greatest concern when using the platform is that “there are too many bots or fake accounts.”

So Common Thread sat down with Twitter’s resident bot expert to understand the problem and clear up misconceptions about bots on Twitter. Yoel Roth is the Head of Site Integrity for Twitter, overseeing the multiple teams that write and enforce the rules around spam, bots, misinformation, disinformation, and more. One of the teams, the platform integrity team, is tasked with sorting humans from robots (although they can’t help you if you’re a robot and you don’t know it). 

Not all bots are bad. Some, like @tinycarebot or @queerlitbot, are delightful. Twitter just launched a label for "good bots" as part of an effort to provide more context for accounts you may interact with. (Twitter also rolled out labels for political candidates in late 2019). But the bots that the platform integrity team deals with are generally fake accounts deliberately created to distort information or manipulate people on Twitter. The first way the integrity team sniffs out bots is through machine learning. They train algorithms to recognize common patterns of malicious activity; these automatically challenge between 5 to 10M accounts a week. 

The second, and perhaps more important line of defense, is a forensic team of investigators. These are real people whose job it is to figure out the more complicated questions of whether an account is automated, a real person being paid to behave like a bot, or a real person who just resembles a bot. Sometimes the team works with outside experts like investigative journalists to crack sophisticated campaigns. Even after identifying bots, the task of taking down fake accounts can resemble a game of whack-a-mole.   

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