YOU GOT A BOT PROBLEM — use DARPA’s BOT Killer”
DARPA shared their method of eliminating “bots.
Bots are a particularly pernicious presence on Twitter. While they can be used for good, (R.I.P., original @horse_ebooks), bots often power spam, scams and, most interestingly, very volatile clusters of political and cultural discussion on Twitter. Last year, DARPA confronted the problem and, according to MIT Tech Review, a new report shows just how researchers were able to identify and shutdown the malicious programs.
The report, released last month by researchers at University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon among others, shows the methods used by the teams in a four-week challenge designed to root out those dastardly “influence” bots.
Bots make up about 8.5 percent of Twitter’s user base, but they can congregate when groups of people discuss controversial topics. The challenge asked participants to figure out which Twitter users taking part in a discussion about vaccines. If they managed to find one, would gain points — but if they incorrectly guessed which were bots in the discussion, they would lose them.