The software, which is free and open to the public, scans social media in real time to detect evidence of automated Twitter accounts -- or "bots" -- pushing messages in a coordinated manner, an increasingly common practice to manipulate public opinion by creating the false impression that many people are talking about a particular subject. The method is also known as "astroturfing" because it mimics the appearance of legitimate grassroots political activity.

By leveraging the observatory's expertise and technological infrastructure, BotSlayer gives groups and individuals of any political affiliation the power to detect coordinated disinformation campaigns in real time -- without any prior knowledge of these campaigns. The software's development was supported by a gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

"We developed BotSlayer to make it easier for journalists and political campaigns to monitor potential new disinformation campaigns that attempt to manipulate public opinion using bots," said Filippo Menczer, a professor in the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and director of the Observatory on Social Media. "If there is a suspicious spike in traffic around some specific topic, BotSlayer allows you to spot it very quickly so you can investigate the content and its promoters and, if there appears to be abuse of the platform, report it or communicate to your followers about it."

The use of deceptive bots to sway public opinion is a growing issue in politics in the U.S. and internationally, added Menczer, who is also a part of a group of researchers who found prevalent use of bots in the runup to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Other bot campaigns have sought to influence votes related to the U.K. Brexit movement and elections in France, Germany and Italy.

During the runup to the midterm elections in 2018, for example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee used publicly available tools created by the observatory to report over 10,000 bots spreading voter suppression messages to Twitter, which shut down the accounts. The tools used to inform the report were Botometer, which uses an algorithm to assign a score to Twitter accounts based upon the likelihood they're automated, and Hoaxy, which lets individuals search and visualize the spread of specific topics on Twitter in real time. Botometer is one of the observatory's most popular tools, currently receiving over 100,000 queries per day.