At the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the social media service is actively considering the idea of identifying bots on its platform.
According to TechCrunch, when presented with the question regarding users’ right to know if they’re interacting with a bot or a person, Dorsey said that “more context is good.” And while he did say that Twitter is considering it, he also cautioned that it will be implemented “as far as we can detect them.”
Dorsey went on to describe the challenges Twitter faces in trying to differentiate bot from person. “We can certainly label and add context to accounts that come through our API. Where it becomes a lot trickier is where the automation is actually scripting our website to look like a human actor.”
What Twitter seems to be doing now is identifying “suspicious” activity on its platform with the help an AI. It employed deep learning and machine learning technologies to identify behavioural patterns instead of trying to identify the accounts using names or profile pictures.
That said, what Twitter seems to be doing is challenging accounts that exhibit these strange behaviours to prove that they are human. Failing that, Twitter stops these accounts from logging in entirely. In what way will the bot identification be done, we’ll have to wait for Twitter to say more in the matter.
But what this would for Twitter users in the end is, just like you see ticks at the end of a verified account, maybe you’ll see another marker that will indicate an account to be a bot.
(Source: TechCrunch, Fortune)
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