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"I like to spend my one wild and precious life arguing with strangers in Twitter reply threads. But I want them to be real strangers, not bots, spammers, or fake identities. I don’t want to waste any of my over-wrought insults and smug dunks on a fake account. And since bots make up 15% of Twitter users—and a quarter of all accounts tweeting climate denialist information—that can take some research.\n\n\nYou might have better reasons for sniffing out bots: Maybe you want to check someone’s credentials before you retweet their advice or their breaking news. Maybe you’re a developer fighting spam on your app. Maybe you just want to prove that your shitty co-worker’s ten followers are all fake. In any case, try out these ten tricks for identifying Twitter bots, by researcher and Poynter contributor Henk van Ess.\n\nThe first step is to check when an account started, which is displayed on the account’s profile page. While you’re there, look at the account’s followers. Next, check out the account’s first tweets using Twitter’s advanced search, as shown in this video guide:\n\nFrom there, the tips get more complicated, and involve cross-referencing different social media accounts, or running some data analysis. Depending on your goal, you can pick and choose, to spot not just bots, but any account that might not be what it claims to be.\n\nOne extra tip from me: Try insulting the account, and see what happens. But remember, even a bot can block you.\n\nThis story originally ran in 2017 and was updated on 2/21/2020 with new information.\n\n"
<https://lifehacker.com/how-to-spot-a-twitter-bot-1819981824>