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Comment by BubRoss | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of statistics that can be analysed to indicate a bot. If you start with extreme cases and catch 'real' people it might be for the best.

Think about an account that is active 24/7 every day all year, or one that fires off multiple actions per second for long periods of time.

Beyond that, having a limited vocabulary, repetitive phrases, consistently accessing the same thing every few minutes, etc. are all low hanging fruit.

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What are the technical hurdles to these bots? Is API access required?

No bots could use webpages or apps just like people

Many, many “bots” are just people paid to tweet

That's not a problem. If a person is indistinguishable from a bad/rogue/misbehaving bot, it's much better for everyone to ban them.

You’d ban half of Twitter. It’s pretty much impossible to differentiate an actual “person typing like a bot” from a legitimate user that, say, likes to tweet memes a lot. People that think this is an easy problem just don’t have the slightest idea of what it entails.

My point is it's an easy problem once you decide that you don't care about false positives, ie temporarily banning "legitimate" users whose behaviour is indistinguishable from that of bots.

Arguably, those "legitimate" users don't bring anything of value to the platform or society as a whole and should rightfully be shunned.

Most online forums or chats have automated rules whereby posting too fast or too often will get you slowed down or banned. Sometimes legitimate users get caught by the filters, no big deal. Twitter could make their existing rules much more stringent.

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