Slashdot Mirror
Report: Up To 15% Of Twitter Accounts Are Bots (cbsnews.com)
A team of researchers claim they can identify Twitter account activity that's posted by bots through their new web portal -- "Bot or Not?" -- leveraging "more than a thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data." And it turns out there are a lot of bots. An anonymous reader writes:
"A study released by the University of Southern California reports that roughly nine to 15 percent of Twitter accounts...are so-called bots controlled by software instead of humans," according to CBS News. "Twitter boasts 319 monthly active users meaning that this recent revelation equates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, according the university's high-end figure." CNBC adds that "The research could be troubling news for Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base in the face of growing competition from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and others." In a 2014 SEC filing Twitter admitted that between 5 and 8% of their users were bots.
Twitter's response to this new report? "Many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters ... or from customer service points of view."
Twitter's response to this new report? "Many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters ... or from customer service points of view."
Mine @peetm is partly a bot - tweeking for me.
@peetm
'Nuff said.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Up to 100% of twitter accounts are mindless bots.
Some people are saying that @realDonaldTrump is definitely a bot. But I wouldn't want to tell you that, you'll have to make your own mind up about it.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
My system posts to twitter accounts automatically. I don't know if these are considered "bots" - they just post community alerts (weather and stuff), and that's all. However, I have noticed that within seconds of when my system tweets a URL, that URL is hit by upwards of 20 times (not by twitter) within a couple seconds. I presume these are the "bots" in question. Further, that happens to accounts that I just set up that don't even have any followers yet.
Better known as 318230.
OK, so the summary says that Twitter boasts 319 monthly active users.
One of them is Trump.
At least 316 are hardcore Trump supporters.
Who are these other two?
Only 15%? That should be *good* news for twitter! Unless it's 15% of 319 monthly active users, of course.
(Spoiler: TFA title is 48M bots, which gives 319M users).
This honestly isn't a bad thing. To a huge degree, Twitter has replaced RSS as a simplistic syndication service. For example: I follow @slashdot on Twitter. This account is a bot, not a human. The entire feed are headline posts from Slashdot's front page with links to the articles. Opening Twitter allows me to see Slashdot headlines intermixed with other headlines from other automated aggregate services which I follow. I personally believe that Twitter should embrace this type of connectivity further rather than only focus on human users.
Seems kind of low to me... I would have expected that number to be much higher. Perhaps they are just being overly conservative with their confidence interval. ^_^
With a better bot detection, twitter could stop flagging new registered accounts after the first few minutes and then requiring a mobile number to continue.
Intentionally putting in wrong stuff now, in order to get people to check and/or reply to point out the error?
They're the ones that can type legibly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd bet a dollar that the bulk of Twitter readers are also bots that look for keywords and trends; actual people interact with that data only via pie charts and summaries. Sure, a few accounts like Trump are actually followed by real people but that's a minority.
lucm, indeed.
No... in fact, I've seen someone comment "Moderated troll for quoting the summary, that's a new one!", before. You must be new... 738835... oh forget it!
I'm shocked at this number. Only 15%?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Number of bots owned by marketing and PR firms, probably make up between 25 and 40%. 15% is the rock bottom number. Keep in mind we're counting active monthly users, not total.
moox. for a new generation.
When I started a corporate Twitter there was a nice young man you often retweeted me. Such a nice young man. I checked out his bio. He was a real guy who is an expert in my field so I appreciated his support. After a while I noticed no matter what time of the day or night I tweeted he'd retweet me minutes later. Either he was a stalker or a bot. When I realized that our professional relationship was over, though lets be honest: It never existed.
The other kind of follower you get is some judging by her profile photo some incredibly hot woman who posts airhead twit. "HAD CREAME CHEESE BAGEL! BEST BAGEL EVER! #TOTALYUM".
So yeah fuck all that in a bad way.
Seriously you un-anonymous non-cowards, read the article before you post a comment claiming you're an expert in every field and you totally disagree with the conclusions of the article you never read.
/ um, maybe 85% is too low // I didn't even read the article about Twitter bots, SO THERE!
I say BOTH of them (Twitter and 4chan) be BANNED from the Internet, as a waste of bandwidth and in general bad for the Internet and Humanity in general.