Slashdot Mirror
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.
Nah. There are lots of famous people who don't post nudes who have tons of followers. Obama, for example, has 102 million followers and I'm quite sure he's never posted nudes.
Just file this one under "NO FUCKING SHIT" - Twitter is the modern day RSS feed. Slashdot has a "bot" account as well. Every new article posted to the front page is shared w/ link to their Twitter feed. Cross-posting tools do the same, too (such as Facebook, Instagram, and anything that shared an image before Twitter allowed images directly)
Nah. There are lots of famous people who don't post nudes who have tons of followers. Obama, for example, has 102 million followers and I'm quite sure he's never posted nudes.
You have to wonder how many of those followers are democratic party bots?
There are famous people on twitter, some (maybe most) of them aren't the actual people, just their PR teams, or interns...
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.
twitter, youtube and facebook all suffer the same malaise: cooking the books when it comes to interactivity numbers. Likes, subscribes, and similar artifacts of user interaction have no incentive to be properly vetted by either consumers or the platforms owner. For example: Fandango doesnt need you questioning the number of absurdly high likes for the upcoming Marvel trailer because that number drives revenue for them outside the platform. more likes means more user interest, a better chance to arrive on the front page of youtube, and in turn more hype generated by editors and content managers on other sites as they visit Youtube for their daily meme fix. Content management and talent management agencies that handle big names like Pewdiepie, Markiplier and similar artists dont need you questioning their half-billion member subscription count either, as the carefully curated presence on Youtube of these celebrities translates directly to the salaries of numerous behind-the-scenes studio workers in Hollywood.
but the sword cuts on both edges. Industries that have slept through nearly 20 years of fake currency in the way of likes/tweets/subscribes have no purchase when they suddenly turn around and decry fake news and the outcome of popular opinion that was driven by their broken system.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.