Bot Sentinel

Bot Sentinel is a Twitter analytics service founded in 2018 by Christopher Bouzy. It tracks disinformation, inauthentic behavior and targeted harassment on Twitter.[1][2]

Bot Sentinel
Formation2018 (2018)
FounderChristopher Bouzy
Websitebotsentinel.com

History

Christopher Bouzy was born on May 22, 1975.[3] He lives in New York. He said that he started coding on a Mattel Aquarius computer when he was 9 years old. According to his LinkedIn page, he started out as a computer service technician, and founded several firms prior to setting up Bot Sentinel.[4] Bouzy founded Bot Sentinel in 2018.[1]

In August 2022, Twitter said it would revoke Bot Sentinel's access to its APIs, saying that Bot Sentinel's tracker activity was in violation of its API policies. At the time, Twitter was in a legal dispute with Elon Musk over his acquisition of the platform.[1]

In October 2022, attorney Nathaniel Broughty, who runs a YouTube channel named Nate the Lawyer, filed a lawsuit in Hudson County Superior Court in New Jersey, claiming that he had been incorrectly flagged by Bot Sentinel as well as targeted for defamation by Christopher Bouzy.[5]

In December 2022, Bot Sentinel announced that it would be launching a beta version of Spoutible, a Twitter-like social media platform, in January 2023.[6] The launch occurred on February 1, 2023, with nearly 150,000 users applying for pre-registration.[7]

Investigations

Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Bouzy said that inauthentic Twitter accounts were promoting false or unverified claims of voter fraud, or advancing then-President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of impropriety in the counting of ballots.[8]

In October 2021, Bot Sentinel released their analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as a result of which they found 83 accounts with a combined number of 187,631 followers that were possibly responsible for approximately 70 percent of the negative content posted about the couple. The report prompted an investigation by Twitter. The company stated that it found no evidence of "widespread coordination" between the accounts, and said that it had taken action against users who violated Twitter's conduct policy.[9] Bouzy was himself responsible for initiating a discourse on Twitter that criticized Harry's brother and sister-in-law Prince William and Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, for their appearance by tweeting that they were "aging in Banana years".[4]

A January 2022 Bot Sentinel report said that online hate campaigns targeting Harry and Meghan had become a "cottage industry" for a few online influencers exclusively posting about the couple. The report described it as "a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise" where "racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators", and described the conspiracy theories the influencers promoted about Harry and Meghan as being reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy theory.[2]

Bouzy has also conducted paid-for private research for the legal team of Amber Heard and unpaid research on bot attacks against Pete Buttigieg.[10]

Methodology

Bot Sentinel relies on machine learning to identify Twitter bots, using millions of tweets from suspended accounts that are categorized as being either bots or not bots. The service is trained to identify what Bouzy calls "problematic accounts".[11]

References
  1. Hays, Kali (August 22, 2022). "In the midst of its battle with Elon Musk, Twitter threatens to revoke Bot Sentinel's data access after founder suggests Twitter has more than 5% 'bots'". Business Insider. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  2. Cockerell, Isobel (December 14, 2022). "Meghan never stood a chance against the internet". Coda Media. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  3. Christopher Bouzy [@cbouzy] (May 22, 2021). "BREAKING: I turned 46 today and Matt Gaetz is going through some things" (Tweet). Retrieved December 27, 2022 – via Twitter.
  4. Wace, Charlotte (December 7, 2022). "Who is Christopher Bouzy in the Harry and Meghan Netflix trailer?". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  5. "An Attorney Who Was Labeled a 'Twitter Troll' Has Lawyered Up". New Jersey Law Journal. November 4, 2022. Retrieved January 2, 2023.
  6. Hays, Kali. "Twitter alternatives that got traction after Elon Musk takeover are suddenly seeing downloads plunge. Which has staying power and who is the next Clubhouse?". Business Insider. Retrieved December 26, 2022.
  7. Laubry, Théo (February 3, 2023). "Spoutible, une alternative crédible à Twitter?" [Spoutible, a credible alternative to Twitter?]. Slate (in French). Retrieved February 5, 2023.
  8. Tucker, Eric; Fox, Ben (April 28, 2021). "Post-election vote tallying raises fresh security concerns". Associated Press. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  9. Cheng, Amy (October 27, 2021). "Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was target of organized hate campaign on Twitter, report says". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 27, 2021.
  10. Lucas, Jessica (October 14, 2022). "'Sometimes You've Got to Fight Fire With Fire': A Vigilante Coder Goes to War Against Misinformation". The Information. Retrieved January 2, 2022.
  11. Mehrotra, Dhruv (September 30, 2022). "Bot Hunting Is All About the Vibes". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
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