BotDetector

A bot detection extension for identifying trolls, bots, and astroturfing accounts

A completely open-source bot detection extension for identifying trolls, bots, and astroturfing accounts on social media. **Overview** BotDetector is a open-source web extension to help users detect and flag posts that are most likely to be artificial. Visit the [repo](https://github.com/m-riley04/BotDetector) and [support me]( https://buymeacoffee.com/rileymeyerkorth)! **Features** - Per-post and per-user bot probability algorithm via a "checks and weights" system - Checks are examinations of specific elements of a post/user. They are either true or false. - Every check has an associated weight assigned to it. A positive weight indicates a better chance of being a bot. A negative weight indicates less of a chance to be a bot (aka a better chance to be a human/real). - Per-post probability badges - Extensive customization - Customizable bot detection threshold - The default detection threshold is at 75%, but you can always raise or lower that to your liking! - Per-check toggles and weight sliders in the popup - If you don't agree with my checks/weights, just change them! - In the future, I will be expanding this system to allow users to add their own checks via RegEx and other factors. - Allowlist/blocklist - Editable in the popup or from a post's details dialog ("Mark as human", "Always hide"). - Show hidden posts - Reveals posts hidden by "Hide likely bots", and the popup shows counts for the current page. - Export/import settings data **Detection Methods** In general, I believe in being safe than sorry. I'd rather assume the whole internet is bots than believe the amount of hate there is truly representative of reality. Because of that belief, I believe some false-positves are worth it to help the mental health of users. - Fancy text detection - A lot of bots/trolls use lookalike text to confuse users - Some users might also use unicode fonts for pazazz (i.e. "𝖈𝖑𝖎𝖈𝖐 𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊") - Shortend link expansion - Links on many social media sites are shortened and/or go through a proxy. This makes it difficult for detection algorithms to find suspicious links. - The background script _safely_ fetches each shortened page (no cookies, no redirects followed, the destination is never contacted) and reads the destination, so adult/link-in-bio sites (OnlyFans, Fansly, bouncy.ai, beacons.ai, dm.bio...) are recognised. - Requires host permissions for each link-shortener domain (i.e. `https://t.co/*`). If expansion seems to do nothing, grant it under `about:addons` -> BotDetector -> Permissions. - Username history - If the user visits the "About this user" page, a change within the last year or 3+ changes is flagged (a sign of a sold or hacked account) - For Twitter, he extension doesn't currently fetch it itself because Twitter's private query needs rotating IDs. API support is being considered. ***Keyboard Shortcuts*** - `Alt+R`: manually re-scan reports - `Alt+K`: quick-open popup menu **Developing and Contributing** To learn how to develop, build locally, and contribute to BotDetector, look at the contributing docs in `CONTRIBUTING.md` in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/m-riley04/BotDetector **Social Media-Agnostic Approach** Internally, this extension uses an adapter pattern approach to allow multiple different social media sites to be able to be detected. Currently, I am focusing on Twitter (one of the main culprits for bot activity), but the system can allow for a wide variety of sites. This system will be expanded in future versions. **AI Policy** Let me be clear: this does NOT utilize a generative AI model (i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) for it's detections. This is NOT a ChatGPT wrapper! Perhaps in the future, I could implement some _machine learning_ algorithm (_NOT_ an LLM) to detect post intent, but that's for the future.