History
According to hisFounder
Bouzy was born on May 22, 1975. He grew up in New York City in what he described as a lower middle class upbringing, with his mother, a single parent. They shared a residence with his grandmother, two aunts and two cousins. Bouzy started coding on a Mattel Aquarius computer his mother bought him when he was 9 years old. Bouzy lives in New York, and is married, with a daughter. Bouzy and his family have received harassment due to his work on Bot Sentinel. His mother died in 2021 after being infected with COVID-19 while dealing with cancer; Bouzy said she was afraid to take the COVID-19 vaccine because "she had just heard so many different things [online]", and has cited her memory as part of the reason for being proactive with getting Twitter and other platforms to remove misinformation from their platforms.Investigations
Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, Bouzy said that inauthentic Twitter accounts were promoting false or unverified claims of voter fraud, or advancing then-President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of impropriety in the counting of ballots. In October 2021, Bot Sentinel released their analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as a result of which they found 83 accounts with a combined number of 187,631 followers that were possibly responsible for approximately 70 percent of the negative content posted about the couple. The report prompted an investigation by Twitter. The company stated that it found no evidence of "widespread coordination" between the accounts, and said that it had taken action against users who violated Twitter's conduct policy. Bouzy was himself responsible for initiating a discourse on Twitter that criticized Harry's brother and sister-in-law William, Prince of Wales, Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, for their appearance by tweeting that they were "aging in Banana years". A January 2022 Bot Sentinel report said that online hate campaigns targeting Harry and Meghan had become a "cottage industry" for a few online influencers exclusively posting about the couple. The report described it as "a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise" where "racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators", and described the conspiracy theories the influencers promoted about Harry and Meghan as being reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Bouzy has also conducted paid-for private research for the legal team of Amber Heard as well as unpaid research on bot attacks against public figures such as Heard, Meghan Markle, Pete Buttigieg and Lisa Page.Operation
Bot Sentinel relies on machine learning to identify Twitter bot, Twitter bots, using millions of tweets from suspended accounts that are categorized as being either bots or not bots. The service is trained to identify what Bouzy calls "problematic accounts". Its algorithm gives Twitter accounts a score between 0% and 100%, which is based on their resemblance to accounts that violate Twitter's rules. As of October 2022, Bot Sentinel consisted of Bouzy and three programmers and Data science, data scientists. Bot Sentinel receives funding through donations on its website, which allows its browser extensions and hate trackers to be used free of charge by the general public.References
External links
* {{Official website, https://botsentinel.com