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Bot Sentinel
Formation2018; 6 years ago (2018)
FounderChristopher Bouzy
Websitebotsentinel.com

Bot Sentinel is a Twitter analytics service founded in 2018 by Christopher Bouzy. It tracks disinformation, inauthentic behavior and targeted harassment on Twitter.[1][2]

History

Bot Sentinel was founded in 2018 by American tech entrepreneur Christopher Bouzy. Its stated goal is to improve Twitter users' experience, and it says that people should be able to engage in "healthy online discourse without inauthentic accounts, toxic trolls, foreign countries, and organized groups manipulating the conversation."[1] Bouzy was inspired to create Bot Sentinel by the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[3]

In August 2022, Twitter said it would revoke Bot Sentinel's access to its APIs, saying that Bot Sentinel's tracker activity was in violation of its API policies. At the time, Twitter was in a legal dispute with Elon Musk over his acquisition of the platform.[1]

Spoutible

In November 2022, Bouzy proposed the creation of a social media platform similar to Twitter, but with improvements to its best features "while fixing everything wrong with Twitter", pledging to follow through with the proposal if 100,000 people joined a pre-registration mailing list. Bouzy used Twitter to crowdsource details about the platform, including its name. Bouzy initially chose the name "Spout" in reference to the old Twitter error graphic; he said that he chose "Spoutible" instead after the owner of the spout.com domain demanded $1.5 million.[4]

That December, Bot Sentinel announced that it would be launching a beta version of Spoutible in late January 2023.[5] The launch occurred on February 1, 2023, with nearly 150,000 users having applied for pre-registration.[6] The website faced many issues after going live, including its API not being adequately secured, which resulted in users' personal information being temporarily exposed. It eventually stabilized toward the end its first week.[4]

Features

Spoutible has the following features:

  • Posts, which are referred to as "spouts", can be edited for up to seven minutes after being published.[6][4]
  • Spouts have a character limit of 300, compared to Twitter's 280. If a URL is included in a spout, it can be removed to reduce the character count.[6]
  • Users can delete replies that they find offensive.[6][4]
  • Blocked users cannot interact with the blocking user at all, including in response to comments.[6]
  • Integration with Bot Sentinel's scoring system.[4]

Investigations

Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Bouzy said that inauthentic Twitter accounts were promoting false or unverified claims of voter fraud, or advancing then-President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of impropriety in the counting of ballots.[7]

In October 2021, Bot Sentinel released their analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as a result of which they found 83 accounts with a combined number of 187,631 followers that were possibly responsible for approximately 70 percent of the negative content posted about the couple.[8][9][10] The report prompted an investigation by Twitter. The company stated that it found no evidence of "widespread coordination" between the accounts, and said that it had taken action against users who violated Twitter's conduct policy.[9][10] Bouzy was himself responsible for initiating a discourse on Twitter that criticized Harry's brother and sister-in-law Prince William and Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, for their appearance by tweeting that they were "aging in Banana years".[11]

A January 2022 Bot Sentinel report said that online hate campaigns targeting Harry and Meghan had become a "cottage industry" for a few online influencers exclusively posting about the couple. The report described it as "a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise" where "racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators", and described the conspiracy theories the influencers promoted about Harry and Meghan as being reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy theory.[2]

Bouzy has also conducted paid-for private research for the legal team of Amber Heard as well as unpaid research on bot attacks against public figures such as Heard, Meghan Markle, Pete Buttigieg and Lisa Page.[3]

Operation

Bot Sentinel relies on machine learning to identify Twitter bots, using millions of tweets from suspended accounts that are categorized as being either bots or not bots. The service is trained to identify what Bouzy calls "problematic accounts".[12] Its algorithm gives Twitter accounts a score between 0% and 100%, which is based on their resemblance to accounts that violate Twitter's rules.[3]

As of October 2022, Bot Sentinel consisted of Bouzy and three programmers and data scientists. Bot Sentinel receives funding through donations on its website, which allows its browser extensions and hate trackers to be used free of charge by the general public.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b c Hays, Kali (August 22, 2022). "In the midst of its battle with Elon Musk, Twitter threatens to revoke Bot Sentinel's data access after founder suggests Twitter has more than 5% 'bots'". Business Insider. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  2. ^ a b Cockerell, Isobel (December 14, 2022). "Meghan never stood a chance against the internet". Coda Media. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  3. ^ a b c d Lucas, Jessica (October 14, 2022). "'Sometimes You've Got to Fight Fire With Fire': A Vigilante Coder Goes to War Against Misinformation". The Information. Archived from the original on October 14, 2022. Retrieved January 2, 2022.
  4. ^ a b c d e Koerner, Brendan I. "'Building a Platform Like Twitter Is Not Difficult'". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved June 21, 2023.
  5. ^ Hays, Kali. "Twitter alternatives that got traction after Elon Musk takeover are suddenly seeing downloads plunge. Which has staying power and who is the next Clubhouse". Business Insider. Archived from the original on December 26, 2022. Retrieved December 26, 2022.
  6. ^ a b c d e Laubry, Théo (February 3, 2023). "Spoutible, une alternative crédible à Twitter?" [Spoutible, a credible alternative to Twitter?]. Slate (in French). Archived from the original on February 5, 2023. Retrieved February 5, 2023.
  7. ^ Tucker, Eric; Fox, Ben (April 28, 2021). "Post-election vote tallying raises fresh security concerns". Associated Press. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  8. ^ Hall, Ellie (October 26, 2021). "Twitter Data Has Revealed A Coordinated Campaign Of Hate Against Meghan Markle". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on February 27, 2023. Retrieved February 27, 2023.
  9. ^ a b Cheng, Amy (October 27, 2021). "Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was target of organized hate campaign on Twitter, report says". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on October 27, 2021. Retrieved October 27, 2021.
  10. ^ a b Davies, Caroline (October 27, 2021). "Meghan target of coordinated Twitter hate campaign, report finds". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on October 7, 2022. Retrieved March 16, 2023.
  11. ^ Wace, Charlotte (December 7, 2022). "Who is Christopher Bouzy in the Harry and Meghan Netflix trailer?". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  12. ^ Mehrotra, Dhruv (September 30, 2022). "Bot Hunting Is All About the Vibes". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.

External links

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bot_Sentinel&oldid=1161164172

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