Foreign manipulation campaigns on social media can be spotted by looking at clues in the timing and length of posts and the URLs they contain, researchers have found. From the 2016 US presidential election to Brexit, a growing number of political events are thought to have been targeted by foreign activity on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Now researchers say they have developed an automated machine learning system – a type of artificial intelligence – that can spot such posts, based on their content. "We can use machine learning to automatically identify the content of troll postings and track an online information operation without human intervention," said Dr Meysam Alizadeh, of Princeton University, a co-author of the research. The team say the approach differs from simply detecting bots, which they say is important since such campaigns often include posts by humans.

Foreign manipulation campaigns on social media can be spotted by looking at features such as the timing and length of posts, and the URLs they contain, researchers have found. From the 2016 US presidential election to Brexit, a growing number of major political events are thought to have been targeted by foreign activity on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Now researchers say they have developed an automated machine learning system – a type of artificial intelligence – that can spot such posts, based on their content. "We can use machine learning to automatically identify the content of troll postings and track an online information operation without human intervention," said Dr Meysam Alizadeh of Princeton University, co-author of the research. The team say the approach differs from simply detecting bots, which they say is important since such campaigns often include posts by humans.