What is the difference between a Troll and an Internet Bot

Throughout recent years, words like “bots”, “botnets”, and “savages” have entered standard discussions about interpersonal organizations and their effect on majority rule governments. However, discussions about malicious social media accounts have frequently been diverted from their substance to their definitions.

Some of DFRLab’s working definitions and methods for identifying, exposing, and explaining online disinformation are described in this post.

What are bots?

A social media account that is run by an algorithm rather than a human is known as a bot. To put it another way, a bot is made to post without human intervention. Twelve indicators that can be used to identify a bot were previously provided by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).Anonymity, a high level of activity, and the amplification of particular users, subjects, or hashtags are the three primary indicators of a bot.

A user account cannot be considered a bot if it makes individual posts and interacts with them through comments, replies, or other means.

Twitter and other social networks that allow users to create multiple accounts are the most common places to find bots.

Is it possible to determine whether a user account is not a bot?

Taking a look at the tweets that the account has written themselves is the easiest way to determine whether or not it is a bot. Using the straightforward search feature in Twitter’s search bar is an easy way to accomplish this.

It is highly unlikely that the account in question is a bot if the tweets that were returned by the search are genuine—that is, they were not copied from another user.

What makes a bot different from a troll?

A troll is someone who posts offensive or off-topic content in an online community or social network with the intention of causing conflict or offense among other users. Their objective is to derail discussions and elicit an emotional response from others.

A troll is a real user, whereas a bot is a machine, so the two are distinct. The two kinds of accounts cannot coexist.

Savaging as an action, be that as it may, isn’t restricted to savages alone. Trolls have been observed to use bots to amplify some of their messages, according to DFRLab. For instance, in August 2017, the DFRLab was the target of troll accounts that were amplified by bots following an article about the protests in Charlottesville. This is one way that bots can and have been used for trolling.

What does a botnet do?

A network of bot accounts managed by the same person or group is known as a botnet. The term “bot herder” or “bot shepherd” refers to those who oversee botnets, which necessitate initial human intervention prior to deployment. The purpose of botnets is to create social media engagement for a particular topic, giving the impression that “real” users are more engaged with it than they actually are. Because engagement on social media platforms leads to more engagement, a successful botnet exposes the topic it is deployed on to a greater number of actual users.

What does a botnet do?

A botnet’s objective is to give the impression that a hashtag, user, or keyword is more popular or talked about (positively or negatively) than it actually is. In order to influence the trending section, bots target social media algorithms. This would expose unsuspecting users to conversations amplified by bots.

Human users are rarely targeted by botnets, and when they do, it is only to spam or generally harass them, not to actively try to change their political or opinion views.

How can a botnet be identified?

Botnet herders have become more cautious as a result of Twitter’s bot purge and improved detection methodology, making it more difficult to identify individual bots. Analyzing the patterns of large botnets to confirm that its individual accounts are bots is an alternative to identifying individual bots.

Six indicators have been identified by DFRLab that may assist in identifying a botnet. Pay attention to the following if you come across a group of accounts that you think might be part of a botnet.

It is essential to keep in mind that no single indicator is sufficient to conclude that suspicious accounts are a part of a botnet when analyzing them. These assertions ought to be backed up by at least three indicators of a botnet.