Introducing Botometer X

The original Botometer website was disabled after Twitter (now X) suspended free access to their data for researchers. However, there is still a need for bot detection. So we decided to revive the tool even if it only has minimal functionality compared with the original Botometer. To differentiate the new version from the original one, we rebranded it as Botometer X.

Unlike the original Botometer that fetched data from Twitter and calculated bot scores on the fly, Botometer X is in archival mode and relies on pre-calculated scores based on historical data collected before June 2023. This means that no records exist about accounts created after May 31, 2023 (when Twitter ended its free API). Even for accounts created earlier, we do not have a complete or representative coverage of Twitter users. And the scores may not reflect recent account activities. On the plus side, Botometer X no longer requires users to sign in to Twitter.

Under the hood, Botometer X leverages the BotometerLite model that generates a score based on account metadata. For details of the BotometerLite model, please refer to our paper. Since the BotometerLite model was trained before the release of advanced generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, it does not have the ability to detect bots supercharged by AI.

Botometer X is currently available through the web interface (https://botometer.osome.iu.edu). We are planning to add it to the Botometer Pro API to allow users to obtain bot scores in bulk. Please stay tuned.