Twitter Reports 23 Million Users Are Actually Bots

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @09:15PM 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.

2 of 84 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

How can they be sure? by GearheadShemTov · 2014-08-12 22:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

My question is, how could they tell? Could you decisively prove you're a human in only 140 characters?
1. Re:How can they be sure? by SuricouRaven · 2014-08-12 22:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Statistics, perhaps? Humans must have an 8-ish hour downtime every day*. Easy enough to detect that cycle over a long enough period. If someone has been posting every hour for a week, they are certainly fishy: It's either a bot or a shared account.
  *Humans suck.