Do you know who is behind that Twitter account tweeting about the coronavirus? Is it a human or bot? The COVID-19 Bots Dashboard is a data visualization tool designed to help users, journalists, and researchers to monitor the health of coronavirus discussions on Twitter. It analyzes publicly available posts from Twitter to spot the use of automation a.k.a. ‘bots’. The information on this this dashboard is based on an automated real-time analysis of a large sample of English tweets containing keywords “Coronavirus” or “COVID”, as provided by Twitter’s Streaming API.
- The [Tweets/Accounts Now Deleted or Hidden Chart] shows an estimate of the percentage of tweets that are now either: deleted by the user, hidden/protected by the user, or is no longer visible/accessible because the user’s account have been suspended by Twitter. This chart also shows an estimate of the percentage of accounts that are now either: hidden/protected by the user or is no longer visible/accessible because the user’s account have been suspended by Twitter. You can use this chart to get a sense of the proportion of tweets and accounts that were subsequently deleted/hidden either by: the user (due to self-censoring? Typos? Errors?, etc…) or Twitter (due to a violation of their Terms of Service?).
- These last three charts show the [Top 50 Most Frequently Mentioned Users], [50 Most Active Users] and the [50 Most Active Users (Automated)] that are tweeting about the coronavirus. You can use these charts to see whether any of the accounts highlighted might be a bot or are using some degree of automation. Click on any of the bars in the last three charts to explore and decide for yourself.