The bots have found me!

Yesterday I spotted a sudden spike in new followers to my Twitter account. My excitement soon turned to amusement. It appears I have been found by a slew of Japanese bots!

I have no idea what keyword triggered their attention. I assumed, given their nationality, that I might have posted about Hashimoto's but a quick glance of my recent tweets showed no mention of my autoimmune disease. Perhaps it was my posts about AI and chatbots that attracted them?

Whilst these types of bots can be a bit pesky, for me I see them as an opportunity. Firstly they inspired this post! But also I run social media training and this provides me with some great examples of what a bot looks like and what to do about them.

The first indication that I had bots following me was actually pretty obvious. I suddenly had this long list of Japanese followers. As I do not post in Japanese or about Japan this is a clear red flag.

Sometimes however they may be harder to spot, especially if they do not start following you en masse. It is a good practice to check your followers from time to time to see if you are getting "bot heavy". The fact is having lots of bots following you can have a negative impact on your social media. Most platforms actively discourage bots and the use of bots can lead to your account being taken down, banned etc.

There is also the fact that bots can mess up the algorithm showing your content. Many social media platform algorithms will show your content to some your followers. The level of engagement from these followers can then drive whether that content gets shown to more people or indeed if your account is identified as a good or bad source of engaging content. Given that bots will not generally engage with your content (or at least not in a positive way) this can mean that your content ends up not being seen as much as it could be.

So how can you spot a bot?

Profile images

The easy ones to spot do not even have a photo or header image, such as the first image below. Most however make a minimal effort to at least have the profile image so at a glance they do not stick out. You will notice from the images below though that none of them have headers.

On Instagram I have noticed some bots that have private accounts, making it harder to check - but the obvious ones do not have a profile image. My advice would be never to follow an account with no profile image!

Bio / Profile details

The next thing to look at is their bio. In my case they were all in Japanese but Twitter has a useful translate function. Most of my new "followers" are ladies looking for "friends" and very kindly sharing their physical dimensions (43kg with a G cup? Really?!). There are also a number which seem to be wanting to give me money (Really? Awesome!). In case it is not obvious these are clearly bot baits trying to get me to engage. They are not incredibly skinny well endowed women or people giving cash away for free.

Activity

Another thing to look at is their activity. Most of my following bots have not shared anything. Previously I have seen bots with one or two posts but they are scam posts - trying to get you to click on a dodgy link for example.

As in my case, where there has been a flurry of activity, you may also spot something odd about when all these accounts started. All my bots set up their accounts in November 2022. I mean every single one of the 30 plus. Very suspicious.

Following / Followers

You may think of looking at the following / follower side of things. Generally you will see these account follow a large number of people. You might assume that as they are bots no one would be following them, but a word of warning here - most seem to have some followers! Some of these look like unsuspecting people who have just followed a bot. Others look like bots themselves.

So what should you do about bots? On most platforms you can just remove them or block them. If removed then can generally re-follow you, whilst blocked accounts cannot. To do this on Twitter click on the three dots on the profile up by the Follow button. On Instagram it is similar - click on the three dots at the top of the profile. You can also report the account, which is probably also a good idea, although they will just spring up again under a new account.

In my case for the short term my Japanese followers will remain so I can show my students live what they look like and how to remove them. So if you want to see what a Japanese bot looks like on Twitter, or you just want to follow me (if you are not a bot!), then head over to my Twitter account. And if you are interested in healthcare social media training, either as a pharma company, a healthcare professional, or a patient advocate, then do get in touch.