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Twitter Reports 23 Million Users Are Actually Bots

Posted by Soulskill on from the probably-underreporting-by-a-lot dept.

An anonymous reader writes: In its most recent quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter disclosed that approximately 8.5% of its users are actually bots. Some of these 23 million bots were created to make revenue-generating URLs, others were created to collect followers that would later be sold to whoever needs a ready audience, and a few were created to mimic stereotypes just for fun. Now that Twitter is a public company, some wonder if these bots help or hinder Twitter's stock value.

3 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Twitter Bots are GREAT by darkain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Twitter Bots are GREAT! Seriously, Twitter is the new RSS. This is honestly how I find out about the latest Slashdot articles, because their account is bot based to feed content from this site to their Twitter account. A huge chunk of the accounts I follow on Twitter are in this same category, just news services. Twitter has become the modern day RSS feeder, and I personally love it for this purpose.

    1. Re:Twitter Bots are GREAT by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Twitter is the new RSS

      We replace a perfectly-good open standard with proprietary, centralized shit and you call it progress?!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. Re:Slashdot Bot by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I feel bad for those goats.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.