Are you legitimizing suspicious social media accounts?
The great debate over what constitutes a suspicious Twitter account and how to tell if you are following any of them.
About a month ago I wrote a blog post describing a pet project of mine mapping networks of automated Twitter accounts. I called them bots in that post, but that word created some understandable confusion so for the follow up I’m going to be more specific.
The assertion that popular online movements may attract bad actors with a variety of motives — from tacky self-promotion to active disinformation — and that otherwise innocent sounded activities like autofollowing might pull these suspicious accounts into a user’s orbit turned out to be much more controversial than I anticipated. For me it was obvious: anything popular will have at least a few people looking to hijack it. Hopefully unsuccessfully.
But for others it was tantamount to calling their whole movement illegitimate. “Release the ids of the bot accounts,” they said. “So that we can get them removed.”
I was uncomfortable with doing that for a couple of different reasons. First because, the whole point of the original post was that trying to hunt accounts that are suspicious had taught me how difficult it is to define suspicious with any degree of accuracy. There were lots of gray areas. There were…