Could We One Day See a Service on GOLOS for Detecting Bots?
A couple of days ago I came across an article that a couple of students from the California Bay Area have developed an algorithm that can detect fake news and bots on Twitter.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/04/cal-students-expose-fake-news-accounts-bots-twitter/
Their algorithm aims mainly at fake news and propaganda bots but can distinguish the characteristics of human behavior.
“Looking further into these accounts, we realized some of these accounts aren’t really human behavior,” says Phadte. “They’re constantly retweeting every minute throughout the 24 hours, they have thousands of followers – but they created their account really only a month ago”
They launched the site https://botcheck.me and also created a Google Chrome extension to use.
They say their accuracy rate is around 93.5% and should increase as more and more people use their service.
What I found interesting about this is, could this be something that can be used on GOLOS?
GOLOS Bots
There is a lot of users that don't agree with bot usage on the GOLOS platform and I used to be one of them but that changed over time after seeing the bigger picture. I just wonder if something like what those students developed could be possible for a blockchain. I think it can be done but would it be necessary or something that would be wanted by the GOLOS community?
There are many great advantages of bot usage on GOLOS and the fact that this is a blockchain and where rewards are involved, would we even need something like this? Perhaps maybe in the future when the there is a larger userbase we would need something like this but I think having bots like we do now early on with the platform definitely helps with the development and the overall stability.
I mentioned that since rewards are involved, there are many bots that help users earn more rewards and get data from the GOLOS blockchain. I think that's where many people that support bots would disagree with having some type of service to detect bots and the fact that essentially, that type of service is a bot itself. An anti-bot bot lol.
Good Bots and Bad Bots
There are tons of good bots out there that many of us use that improve the user experience. Things like Siri, Google, Alexa, all are automated bots that are useful. These type of good bots allows us to be innovative and to bring that type of use is important to social media and a platform like GOLOS.
There are also a lot of bad bots out there that can be a hinder to platforms and systems that make the user experience less enjoyable. Like bots that are used for malicious purposes like fake news and political propaganda.
The video below is kind of corny but has a few good points on the issue that social media platforms are facing when it comes to bots.
