Social Bots on Twitter are More Than a Minor Nuisance

Bots make it easy to game the system, take revenge on others and undermine the democratic social media environment.

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Twitter’s recent growth has been a cause for celebration across the tech industry, and the finance industry is pretty happy too. However, there’s still a major problem with bots online — and on Twitter especially. Scientists from the University of Indiana developed a tool to identify these bots, but what’s more interesting is why they felt the need to tackle the bot problem.

The methodology for developing the BotOrNot tool was fairly simple. Drawing from a pool of known bots that were identified in 2011, Emilio Ferrara and others compiled a pool of 2.6

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