Cal students has established algorithm to expose fake accounts on twitter known as bots

California students has established algorithm to expose fake accounts on twitter known as bots from their apartment just off the Cal campus.  Ash Bhatia, Rohan Phadte and RoBhat Labs believe they have cracked the code that's been bedeviling social media companies and Congress fake news and bots.

"There are a lot of these political propaganda accounts that are spreading fake news," Phadte said.

Like the famous alt-right account "Jenna Abrams" - which was revealed on Friday to be a Russian bot account.

Botched.me - as well as a Google Chrome extension that can tell, based on a set of characteristics, whether the account you're looking at is flesh and blood or ones and zeros.

"We essentially train on these features - get a good understanding of what a propaganda bot looks like and what a human looks like and then we predict whether the account is bot or not based on that," Bhat says.

The project took these 20-year-olds just eight weeks to complete.

They already tackled identifying fake news and propaganda on Facebook - so Twitter was next.

"Looking further into these accounts, we realized some of these accounts are not really human behavior," says Phadte.

"They're constantly retweeting every minute throughout the 24 hours, they have thousands of followers - but they created their account really only a month ago" Botcheck.me and the Google Chrome extension already have tens of thousands of users and an impressive accuracy rate in separating real people from digital.

"Right now we're around 93.5 percent and that number is going up every single day as users keep using it," Bhat says.

"Our algorithm is definite as a good first step, but we do not have all the Twitter information," The inventors have sent an e-mail to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey but still have not heard back from him.

"A lot of users, tens of thousands of users have actually taken this tool and have actively started classifying propaganda bots on Twitter," Phadte said.

"But we feel it's not the responsibility of these users, it's the responsibility of Twitter and we see this weird predicament right now," adds Bhat.

The algorithm only detects political bots on Twitter.