Botson
Extension Delisted
This extension is no longer available in the official store. Delisted on 2025-09-16.
Extension Actions
- Policy Violation
- Removed Long Ago
- No Privacy Policy
Detect twitter bots in your newsfeed
This chrome extension will show a score on a tweet in your twitter feed based on how likely the twitter account is a bot or a human.
Once you install the chrome extension, you'll be asked to authenticate read-only access to your Twitter account. This is to take advantage Twitter's API limits. Then, when you are on twitter.com, the chrome extension will send twitter accounts to the Botometer API to compute a "confidence score" of likelihood to be a bot. If this score exceeds a certain threshold, the offending tweet will be blurred out with some buttons for you to learn more.
Researchers have estimated at 15% of Twitter accounts are bots. While most of them are harmless, there are many that can be used maliciously, such as spreading false information. This chrome extension will help you discern whether or not the tweet you're reading is from a bot or a human.
Botson is powered by the Botometer API from Indiana University (https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/).
Learn more here: http://botson.net/
The code is open sourced here: https://github.com/lambtron/botson-extension
Latest reviews
- Mark Robinson
- Too many false positives and negative positives.
- PJ Hale
- Nice idea, it's super wrong though. It thinks obvious bots are real and anything with a blue checkmark is a bot.
- David Dunbar
- Botson appears to run even when I am not on Twitter. Something sucks 100% of a CPU when Chrome is running. It stopped when I disabled Botson. It does identify bots.
- Jeff Hobbs
- Tremendous tool, well-implemented.
- Fil Menczer
- Fabulous! And uses the Botometer service from Indiana University!
- Brantley Beaird
- So helpful for determining a twitter user's legitimacy! Many thanks!