Citation

BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots

Author:
Davis, Clayton Allen; Varol, Onur; Ferrara, Emilio; Flammini, Alessandro; Menczer, Filippo
Year:
2016

While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate discussions, alter the popularity of users, pollute content and spread misinformation, and even perform terrorist propaganda and recruitment actions. Here we present BotOrNot, a publicly-available service that leverages more than one thousand features to evaluate the extent to which a Twitter account exhibits similarity to the known characteristics of social bots. Since its release in May 2014, BotOrNot has served over one million requests via our website and APIs.