Identify bot-generated tweets

pankajparashar · 2016-08-10T02:29:48.833Z

I’m using the Twitter Streaming API to fetch tweets from Twitter. I want to determine if the tweet returned in the JSON format, was tweeted by a user or some bot?

Link to the sample JSON returned by the Twitter Streaming API.

andypiper · 2016-08-10T08:51:00.375Z

You could look into the source field of the Tweet to see what client or app it was posted by - I don’t know any other way to filter out these kinds of Tweets though.

pankajparashar · 2016-08-13T05:02:45.023Z

Thanks for the reply. Couple of questions -

What are the list of distinct values for the source field?
Do bot generated tweets have any specific source value?

andypiper · 2016-08-15T13:47:17.867Z

The source field is based on the application name that developers get to configure in their app settings, so there’s no definitive list of all of the available values as it would be very large! You’d have to know (or guess at) the names of bot apps.