@cathal

I do not pretend to be an expert in bot detection, but there are some out there.

@jannamark There are, but they range from solutions that impose mass-surveillance (invasively probing visitors' browsers, storing that info, correlating devices), to those that simply ban things that don't look like browsers (and screw all the outliers, like blind readers), to sketchy solutions that rely on referer / request history information (again, surveillance..).. nothing's perfect. Some of these measures, in careful doses, are useful. But in the main, you can't tell people from bots.

@cathal I'm going to think about this a bit, because, overall, I found I could tell which were bots and trolls yelling at me on twitter and facebook, and which were people with different opinions, who wanted to engage.

Also, I agree/understand that there's a difference between the ham-fisted but successful efforts of a Trump or Brexit campaign, and a subtle gas-lighting or whisper campaign more commonly associated with the psychological manipulation now relegated to bots.

@jannamark That should be a testament to how amazing your brain is, because computers would find that sort of distinction extremely hard, in a realistic war-on-bots scenario. Twitter's bot problem has many cases that would be trivial to fix, but they never bothered; that's not the kind I'm concerned with, though. They basically didn't fight back, so the attackers never bothered with sophistication. Usernames like "frank92754719" are laziness, not a required bot feature. :)