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TheBlackAdder

(28,073 posts)
Mon Aug 21, 2017, 10:28 PM Aug 2017

Crooks & Liars: Did Donald Trump Retweet A Bot? How To Be A Twitter Sleuth (DEMO)

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Crooks & Liars demonstrates how to tell if a bot wrote a tweet, like the one Trump Replied to.


http://crooksandliars.com/2017/08/how-be-twitter-sleuth-donald-trump


Here's Trump's Tweet that begins the article:



This morning Donald Trump post the retweet above. Whenever I see Trump retweet an account I don't recognize, I instantly have to start digging. Now I will show you how to dig as well.

First thing I noticed from the account that Trump retweeted was that it only follows 5 people, and only has 49 tweets. Then I looked at the original tweet:




My first big indication was that Trump retweeted this within 5 minutes. That seems rather quick, but still not enough to really make me declare this some bot. So I decided to dig further.

Twitter offers an API, which is an acronym for Application Programming Interface. It's how things like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and even the Twitter mobile apps connect with Twitter. To help developers out, they also provide a console. So what does that show me? Well let me show you how to utilize this awesome forensic tool and then you can see exactly what I found.

First, you must have a Twitter account and be logged in in order to utilize the console.

Now go to the Twitter API console here https://dev.twitter.com/rest/tools/console (if it comes up blank, hit refresh.) You should see this screen:




A whole lot more at the jump.

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