Came across one the other day, just by mentioning in a post "blue plaque", got instant like and retweet.<p>This started me thinking of a little game - what post with the limitations of 140 characters could you post that would trigger the attention of the most bots for automatic retweets/likes?<p>It's on my to do list, when bored, but I'd imagine others have had comparable thoughts and may of already had a go.<p>Anybody got any other examples?
Better title: "Up to 48 Twitter accounts may be human"<p>Snark aside, there is no way around this. Followers in digital public spaces are representative of social status, the demand for appearing popular will never go away and so neither will the bots.
While automatic control of computerized interfaces should surprise no one, “bot”-like behavior is not limited to computers and isn’t new. One should always be skeptical even when something comes from humans: for instance, a “customer review” could be a paid reviewer, or someone talking on the nightly news could be essentially controlled by the puppet strings of their organization and not really voicing their own position. Ideally no one ever puts too much faith in what they hear from a handful of people because that is not statistically significant (there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. alone, billions in the world; sample sizes must be gigantic).<p>Where “millions” of accounts become dangerous is when trying to determine if even a “statistically significant sample size” is legitimate. I seriously doubt that most organizations ever come close to finding a large enough sample in the first place before reporting a finding. And yet, if they <i>primarily</i> look at online postings instead of actually talking to people, it’s likely that even a large sample is totally messed up. That should concern everyone.
And one of them is mine. It recommends an event once you tweet to her. It is actually a service that many people appreciate. So in summary, bot != bad.
To compare, I looked up the estimates[1][2] on Facebook and if we use 170 million out of 1.4 billion, that's ~11.7%. That is in the ballpark of Twitter's 15% (48m/319m).<p>I guess if you make a popular service that doesn't require a credit-card payment or phone SMS text as a test for human verification, you should expect >10% of fake accounts even with state-of-the-art heuristics detection.<p>[1] not sure why Huffington Post is top google link about it but the other news sites say the same 170M: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-parsons/facebooks-war-continues-against-fake-profiles-and-bots_b_6914282.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-parsons/facebooks-war-co...</a><p>[2] 2015 1Q user count: <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...</a>
This is a result of what I call "audience economy". People want an audience and are willing to pay for it. Audience likes to see a prior audience. Bots enable prior audiences. Platforms like fiverr enable bots.<p><i>Get 5000 twitter followers for $5</i><p>Those 5000 fake followers make you look good to people that come across you, and they flow.<p>So it's all about an initial audience.
I'm thinking that this is not as `black&white` as said.<p>There are accounts which actually are used by people/companies, they post authentic content but do some automated actions.<p>E.g. a company account which tweets authentic content for their field but on the other hand has automated retweets on certain hashtags in order to gain their authors as followers or to come up as related to other accounts in same field.<p>Also to mention that there are services such as IFTTT which actually can help you to automate such actions and make bot-like behavior.<p>I guess the same would apply to Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.
The USC researchers own research says there's a 57 percent chance @realdonaldtrump is a bot<p><a href="http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump" rel="nofollow">http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/?sn=realdonaldtrump</a>
This won't suprised anyone that uses twitter. In fact I rely on 2-3 bots to retweet my tweets and so get more coverage. They have a place, it's not all bad.
There's really no legitimate reason why twitter allows follows via their API[1]. I'm not sure if they see some benefit from allowing spam-follow bots to run wild or what they could possibly be thinking.<p>[1]: <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/create" rel="nofollow">https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/friendships/crea...</a>