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How to spot bot and troll accounts on social media
In This Article
Concerned you’re being duped by a bot or troll account online? Then you’ll want to keep reading this guide where we detail the top tools and tips to help you spot inauthentic and automated accounts on major social networks.
Automated social media bots can be used to share art, weather warnings, or keep customers up-to-date on a company’s news and products. But mostly, when we hear about social “bots” in the news, it’s in the context of deceptive political propaganda, cryptocurrency scams, spam and fraud.
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Twitter trolls
Of all social networks, Twitter and its powerful API (application programming interface) provide the easiest access and data needed for robust detection of suspicious accounts, but not all tools are equal on this front.
Many “free” Twitter follower auditing tools are just trying to sell you their full reporting service. They’ll ask you toadd their app to your account, but most won’t provide a list of your “fake” followers free of charge, and they often include inactive accounts in the figures they produce – a far cry from fakery.
However, the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media’sBotometeris on the level and clearly distinguishes between different kinds of potentially undesirable account, although it will take a while to work through all your followers if you have a lot of them. Fortunately, you can check specific accounts, too.
Also useful isBot Sentinel, a community project that stores and publishes results about accounts as people check them, creating a valuable public archive of problematic accounts.
Analysing Reddit and Facebook
Other major social networks are less forthcoming with regards to coughing up data that could be used to analysis the authenticity or otherwise of the people you interact with. However, there’s a significant body of research about troll and spam accounts that give us some general rules of thumb for making judgements.
TheTROLLMAGNIFIERproject looked at methods of detecting state-sponsored troll accounts on Reddit. No publicly-available software tools have yet come of it, but the research team found that state-sponsored troll accounts in particular tended to loosely coordinate with one another, interacting to push specific narratives and manufacture conflicts – performative augments – between one another about the topics they wished to propagandize.
Facebook publishesregular reportson such “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, with a focus on not only state-sponsored trolls, but alsofinancial scamsandtargeted social engineering attacksdesigned to get prominent influencers and journalists to legitimise the scammers.
Facebook’s 2021threat reportindicates that coordinated trolls increasingly have specific targets in mind for their “influence operations”, defined as “coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal.”
Tiktok and Instagram fakery
Inauthentic accounts are rife on TikTok and Instagram, with a bustling trade in click-farmed likes. A current popular rule of thumb for spotting accounts that buy follower and attention is to quickly view an influencer’s followers to see how many have filled out profiles with avatars, but you’ll generally have to do this by hand. Social marketing firm HypeAuditor provides fake follower audits forTikTokandInstagram, but these provide very few free searches per IP address (use aVPNif you need more) and will only show you analysis of accounts already in their database, which appears to include only the biggest influences.
More usefully, when it comes to spottingpropagandaon TikTok,Tracking Exposedhas turned its analysis tools to the task of spotting it, publishing a detailed report on Russian military propaganda in April 2022. Tracking Exposed has tools available to help analyseTikTok,YouTube, andFacebookaccounts, but, aimed at academics gathering data en masse, the metadata they spit out doesn’t readily lend itself to fast assessment of potential fakery by the layperson.
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Spotting the scammers
As with much of online safety, such as spottingphishingattempts, identifying inauthentic accounts requires us to keep in mind that not everything is as it seems on the internet.
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K.G. Orphanides is a writer and developer whose areas of expertise include internet security, VPNs, Linux for the desktop, small-scale game development, software preservation and computer audio techno…
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Why trust our journalism?
Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
