55 years, 3 months ago

Why It's So Hard to Count Twitter Bots

Is the Twitter account @ElonMusk a bot? Musk also outlined a plan to count bots himself that involved sampling 100 @Twitter followers to see how many were bots and said the approach suggests over 20 percent of accounts are fake. “If you simply mention Elon Musk on Twitter, you immediately get engaged with a ton of crypto bots,” says Chris Bail, a professor of sociology at Duke University who studies social media. To test Musk’s proposed methodology, IV.ai, an AI company, looked at 100 accounts that follow Musk’s car manufacturing company Tesla on Twitter. But many of those accounts also disappeared shortly after, suggesting that Twitter catches bots fairly quickly.

Wired

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