Alternatively, Twitter might very well be flagging conservative accounts for terms of service violations at a high rate.But bots don’t even need to be useful. If Bot Sentinel is inaccurate, it is actively propagandizing, and affecting political discourse in the very manner is claims to fight. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) that he’s arguing with a “trollbot.” Here are but two of thousands of examples. The thing is, liberals often cite Bot Sentinel as an authority on which accounts are real, and which aren’t. It chronicles accounts that have been suspended or are now inactive.īased on Bot Sentinel’s description of its own service, either Twitter’s terms of service appear to flag conservatives at a much higher rate than they flag liberals, or Bot Sentinel isn’t being truthful about how its machine learning works. A trollbot that is actively trying to cause division and discord will behave in a manner consistent with someone who receives a high trollbot score.”īot Sentinel itself also has a Twitter account with nearly 12,000 followers. “However, there are trollbots who engage in deceptive tactics and there is a correlation between troll-like behavior and trollbots who are part of an influence campaign. “Most trollbots are not part of a large conspiracy attempting to influence American policies and/or elections,” it says. The site’s “About” section ends with a disclaimer. Yet Bot Sentinel has flagged mostly pro-Trump accounts as being non-human, or in its words, the product of “foreign countries and organized groups manipulating the conversation.” Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who was a presidential candidate in 2016, and is again in 2020, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and the Black Lives Matter movement. That effort, small as it was, also boosted Sen. That description indicates that Bot Sentinel was formed in response to the “Russian collusion” investigation, during which Americans were told that some social media accounts were controlled by Russians to “meddle” in America’s elections. “We believe Twitter users should be able to engage in healthy online discourse without foreign countries and organized groups manipulating the conversation.” “We launched Bot Sentinel to help diminish the effectiveness of trollbot accounts that infest Twitter,” Bot Sentinel’s site said. Neither Bot Sentinel nor Twitter immediately responded to a request for comment.īot Sentinel also has a “Trollbot” page on its site, which labels accounts that its machine learning deems to be “trolls” (accounts which are apparently not run by humans, though the site does not define what a “trollbot” is) based on its algorithm, which, again, claims to be based on Twitter’s terms of service. This raises an obvious question: If Bot Sentinel truly uses machine learning based on Twitter’s terms of service to tell its users which accounts are “untrustworthy,” does that mean that Twitter’s terms of service are rigged against conservatives? The further one scrolls, the more “untrustworthy” right-wingers one finds. The others on the list are nearly all right-wing accounts. ![]() All of those “untrustworthy” accounts seem to have one thing in common: they all publicly renounced the “Russian collusion” hysteria from the beginning. ![]() It is the first account listed when one views the list of “untrustworthy” accounts on the Bot Sentinel site.Īlso towards the top of that list are Ali Alexander, a conservative commentator, and Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institute media fellow and renowned author and journalist.Ī bit further down the list (but not far) are Federalist reporter Mollie Hemingway and Mark Levin, an author, attorney, and radio show host. Trump’s account is listed as the most untrustworthy account on. The site’s “About” page continues, explaining that the service’s machine learning uses “Twitter rules as a guide when selecting Twitter accounts to train our model” In other words, the accounts that are flagged, at least according to Bot Sentinel, are flagged based on Twitter’s terms of service.Īmid that backdrop, consider the following: Unlike other machine learning tools designed to detect ‘bots,’ we are focusing on specific activities deemed inappropriate by Twitter rules.” “The system can correctly identify trollbot accounts with an accuracy of 95%. “We trained Bot Sentinel to identify specific types of trollbot accounts using thousands of accounts and millions of tweets for our machine learning model,” Bot Sentinel said on its website. A service called Bot Sentinel that is being used to flag “troll” accounts, and accounts on Twitter that are “untrustworthy,” appears to be flagging right-wing Twitter accounts en masse – including that of President Donald J.
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