I stumbled across this online tool today — botsentinel.com — and thought it might be useful for Daily Kos members. You can enter a Twitter account name and it will report back an analysis of the account’s activity with a numeric score and graphic.
For example, the account for our Grifter-in-Chief has a score of 29%. There are four possible levels of activity:
Level |
Score range |
Normal |
0 — 24% |
Disruptive |
25 — 49% |
Suspicious |
50 — 74% |
Alarming |
75 — 100% |
So, Trump falls into the “Disruptive” category, which I think just about everyone would agree with, but isn’t a bot or troll. The analysis includes a textual summary that says
“Our analysis has concluded RealDonaldTrump exhibits disruptive tweet activity but is not a bot/troll account.”
For comparison, our own Fearless Leader, Markos, gets a score of 11%, so those of you who might have had some doubts, rest assured, he’s a real person rather than a bot.
In addition to checking individual accounts, the site does meta analyses of bot/troll activities. So you can see the current trends in top hashtags, topics, phrases, and so on that are bot-generated.
There are some other cool features as well, which you can explore on your own. But one I must point out is the “Fake News” tab, which shows Twitter accounts that are known to spread propaganda and fake news. You’ll find some of the favorite Fox News personalities there, like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Dinesh D'Souza — what a surprise, right?
I know nothing about the owners or developers of the site. A “whois lookup” shows that it is registered via Namecheap (a reputable US registrar) but the actual data is masked (very common to protect privacy). The site’s “About” page has a few paragraphs that say the owner is Christopher Bouzy; I never heard of him before — good or bad — and just a name isn’t enough to be sure that a search is hitting the right person or someone else who shares the name.
I didn’t see any ads on the site but I use an ad-blocker, so I have no info on its funding either. Nor did I see any explanation of the algorithms used to determine the scores and conclusions about accounts.
Give it a whirl and see what you think. At the least, you could look up a Twitter account and get a score; if it’s flagged as being highly suspicious you could take that into consideration.