Bot Spotting

As analysis of events over the past year or so have shown, there are a lot of far-right websites, bot and troll accounts out there pushing myths and propaganda mostly originating in Russia. They are there for every election, trying to drum up support for the extreme right, while smearing opponents.

Their especial targets are: centrists (you'd think the title of this blog wasn't a joke if you were to take their assertions at face value), trans people, the Left in general, people who call out racism, or Islamophobia and, in brief, anyone who isn't a violent fascist bastard.

Their favourite debating tactic is tu quoque: "you're the real racist", "you're a terrorist!!!", "antifa are terrorists" and "Leftists are the real fascists", to list but those.

Here are some web sites which can help you flush them out:

English:

• Channel 4 News Twitter factcheck account
• DFRLAbs guide to bot-spotting
• FactCheck.org
• OSoMe Botometer
• Hamilton 68 (Tracking Russian influence operations on Twitter)
• Make Adverbs Great Again (for Twitter) analyse any user profile, including time zone. Russian Trolls (it's a generic term, they may not be native Russians) have developed a fondness for hiding their real time zone. So when, for example, you see an account that apparently lives in a UTC time zone and only seems to sleep during the day, you know you have a strong suspect.
• Snopes
• Twitonomy: analyse any user profile, including accounts most often replied to/retweeted to.
• The Washington Post fact checker
• The Washington Post RealDonaldContext Chrome plug-in, for Twitter
• BotSentinel for detecting and flagging troll/bot account on Twitter. Very few false positives, but a lot of false negatives. Always cross-check with Adverbs and at least one other service. Includes browser plug-ins for Chrome & Firefox.
• {TweetBotOrNot} Twitter bot spotter

Other languages:

• Decodex (French, but has been known to flag up porkies in English) plug-in for Chrome & Firefox
• Faktisk (Norwegian)