[Virtual] Bot or Human? Unreliable Automatic Bot Detection

The identification of bots is an important and complicated task. The bot classifier Botometer was successfully introduced as a way to estimate the number of bots in a given list of accounts and has been frequently used in academic publications.

Given its relevance for academic research, and our understanding of the presence of automated accounts in any given Twitter discourse, Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser studied Botometer's diagnostic ability over time. To do so, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser collected the Botometer scores for five datasets in two languages (English/German) over three months. For this virtual event, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser discussed their findings and answered questions about the implications of their research.

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