"Instagram is actually pretty hostile to security researchers studying their platform. ...
Which is unfortunate because Instagram is one of the platforms most useful to bad actors."<p>Hmm, perhaps those two facts are more related than Belotti's wording suggests.
There is a well funded and well organized COVID-19 misinformation and smear campaign targeted at citizens of the small country I live in. The same is probably true for pretty much any country right now, but in this case we're talking about a target audience of single digit millions with a language that isn't spoken anywhere else.<p>To make matters worse, this does not seem to be bots but sock puppet accounts and the tweets they put out seem to be written by humans. This campaign has some ties to certain political parties too.<p>What are some means that I could, as a technical person, assist my journalist friends in digging out some info about these actors and their connections? This article gave some pointers, but did not go into specifics.<p>I am mostly interested in Twitter activity. The situation is similar on Facebook but I am less interested in that side. Any tools for digging out some Twitter statistics, given a handful of accounts and suspicious tweets to start with?
There's a great resource on the techniques the bots and the bot detectors use, beside rate limiting IP addresses (creepjs is a personal favorite). [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://bot.incolumitas.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bot.incolumitas.com/</a>
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