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Two-Thirds of Tweeted Links Come From Bots, Report Says (cnet.com)
We already know bots have a significant presence on Twitter. But a report published Monday by the Pew Research Center suggests automated accounts are more prevalent than we may previously have thought. From a report: Pew estimates that two-thirds, or about 66 percent, of the links shared on Twitter come from bots rather than people. The research specifically focused on the 2,315 most popular websites and over 1 million tweets sent between July 27 and Sept. 11, 2017.
I thought Twitter was 100% bots. All I have ever done with Twitter is make it so that stuff from my employers' CMS gets posted to it. Theoretically we do this because someone thinks that some humans out there might be reading our twits, but not a single person in the company said they read Twitter.
Not a single person in the company. But our bot posts.
Many of the traditional news outlets cover things that are trending on twitter. This means that trending twitter subjects leads to news coverage. If twitter is mostly bots, trending on twitter is meaningless and news is doing us a disservice by covering it.
Why do the news organizations rely on twitter? One reason is that it a great way to get quotes on a subject. John Jones "calls for more investigation". Previously, it could take many phone calls to get a good quote. With twitter you can sort through hundreds of potential quotes until you find one that makes your point.
At least some are bots. You can't get any significant number of followers without bots slipping in. There are only 20 people following me (most are friends or bands I know members of) but one is almost certainly a bot that only ran for one day last August, tweeting 5 times and following 668 other people, before going silent. God only knows what the person behind it was trying to accomplish.
Still, over 60 million people voted for Obama in each election, so a large chunk of the 100 million followers are likely to be real.
As far as who runs his account? Probably managed by a PR person, but at least some of the content is provided by Obama. The back and forth between him and George W Bush about NCAA brackets was amusingly mundane. I don't think a PR team would have been able to resist trying to make it more interesting.