
SSRC Media Well
Disinformation, misinformation, and “fake news” are longstanding phenomena that, in the wake of the digital revolution, have become newly politicized and consequential. SSRC's research on the topic.
In 2018 we launched Bot Sentinel to help fight disinformation and targeted harassment. We believe Twitter users should be able to engage in healthy online discourse without inauthentic accounts, toxic trolls, foreign countries, and organized groups manipulating the conversation.
We designed Bot Sentinel to be simple to use and as informative as possible. We publicly display detailed information about Twitter accounts the platform is tracking to give visitors of this website a better understanding of how nefarious accounts spread disinformation and target other accounts. We try to be as transparent as possible and give visitors as many data points as possible. Bot Sentinel is a non-partisan platform; we track all accounts. The platform uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to classify Twitter accounts and add the accounts to a publicly available database that anyone can browse. We trained Bot Sentinel to classify Twitter accounts using thousands of accounts and millions of tweets for our machine learning model. The system can correctly classify accounts with an accuracy of 95%. Unlike other machine learning tools designed to detect “bots,” we are focusing on specific behaviors and activities deemed inappropriate by Twitter rules. We analyze hundreds of tweets to accurately classify each Twitter account and provide an easy-to-understand report.


Disinformation, misinformation, and “fake news” are longstanding phenomena that, in the wake of the digital revolution, have become newly politicized and consequential. SSRC's research on the topic.

The CLC is a volunteer network of individuals trained to monitor for, critically evaluate, and report misinformation on diverse topics central to our civic life: voting, elections, public health, civil rights, and other important issues.

A collection of easy to use resources for identifying misinformation and its psychological tricks

For this first phase of our program, WhatsApp is commissioning a competitive set of awards to researchers interested in exploring issues that are related to misinformation on WhatsApp.