BotSlayer
Principal Investigators: Filippo Menczer & Alessandro Flammini (IUB Informatics)
BotSlayer uses an anomaly detection algorithm to flag hashtags, links, accounts, and media that are trending and amplified in a coordinated fashion by likely bots. A Web dashboard lets users explore the tweets and accounts associated with suspicious campaigns via Twitter, visualize their spread via Hoaxy, and search related images and content on Google.
BotSlayer can be used by journalists, corporations, and political candidates to discover in real-time new coordinated campaigns in their domains of interest, without any prior knowledge of these campaigns. The system is easily installed and configured in the cloud to monitor bot activity around a standing user-defined query. All you need is a Twitter developer app key to fetch data from the Twitter streaming API. Pik-Mai Hui and Kevin Yang (IU SICE) were both critical in the development of BotSlayer.
IUNI's Marc McCarty developed BotSlayer's front end.