AI can distinguish between bots and humans based on Twitter activity

Artificial intelligence is being used to spot the difference between human users and fake accounts on Twitter. Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California in the US, and his colleagues have trained an AI to detect bots on Twitter based on differences in patterns of activity between real and fake accounts. The team analysed two separate datasets of Twitter users, which had been classified either manually or by a pre-existing algorithm as either bot or human. The manually verified dataset consisted of 8.4 million tweets from 3500 human accounts, and 3.4 million tweets from 5000 bots. The researchers found that human users replied four to five times more often to other tweets than bots did.