The Devil’s Triangle: Ethical Considerations on Developing Bot Detection Methods

Social media is increasingly populated with bots. To protect the authenticity of the user, experience machine learning algorithms are used to detect these bots. Ethical dimensions of these methods have not been thoroughly considered yet. Taking histogram analysis of Twitter users' profile images as example, the paper demonstrates the trade-offs of accuracy, transparency, and robustness. Because there is no general optimum in ethical considerations, these dimensions form a "devil's triangle".