Tech Tips for Non-Tech People!
Original Air Date: Mar 16, 2020
Indiana University's Botometer
Is there any doubt anymore about the power that social media has to influence so many people?
Its potential impact can be seen with what people buy, wear, eat, drink or who they support politically around the world.
As with anything that is used by the masses, technology is created to leverage the power in ways that are no longer based on an actual human being.
The use of ‘bots’ has grown quickly and the sophistication can easily make it look like a real human being is posting when it’s actually a bot.
Bots aren’t all evil as many large organization use them to deal with the sheer volume of communications that they may receive every day.
Unfortunately, bots are use by those with malicious intent and the worse case scenario is when a bot can look like a trusted person and use that trust to compromise other user’s accounts.
Finding ways to sniff them out is pretty important so you don’t get fooled as easily.
Because of the ease in which these bots can operate on Twitter, a project developed by researchers from the Observatory on Social Media is available for anyone to use.
What was originally the BotOrNot project is now called the Botometer will check the activity generated by any Twitter account and provide a score on how likely it’s a bot instead of a person.
It’s certainly not a guaranteed way to sniff out all bot accounts, but it does provide a lot more data for you to use to avoid being scammed by a bot: https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu
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