Bots Lead Twitter Discussion on E-Cigarettes
A recent study conducted at San Diego State University found that over half the tweets about e-cigarettes and their use come from robot accounts.
According to an article on Forbes.com, researchers at San Diego State University (SDSU) were conducting a study “designed to use data from Twitter to study the use of e-cigarettes in the U.S., the type of people using them and their perceptions of e-cigarettes.” During the research process, however, they stumbled across old tweets that contained “confusing and illogical content”, which led them to the conclusion that this content came from bots, not real people. “They re-classified the tweets, determining that 70% of the tweets in their dataset was produced by bots,” the article says.
In my opinion, the most alarming part of this discovery is how prevalent bot accounts are, and how skewing of seemingly public opinion they are. According to the article, Twitter has apparently suspended and removed over 70 million bot accounts, but the accounts don’t seem to be disappearing entirely or at all. Particularly in this case, it’s concerning to know that these accounts promote something detrimental to the general welfare of the population (e-cigarettes), especially on a platform that targets a lot of younger generations.
The research at SDSU found that “Two-thirds of tweets from these accounts were supportive of e-cigarette use and 59% were tweets about personal use, despite the study suggesting that a significant proportion of these accounts were not run by real people.” It additionally found that most (55%) of these bots regarded the use of e-cigarettes positively.
This situation and these findings are an important lesson to learn, especially for young adults who have grown up and shaped their own habits in this world of social media. While the true source of these bots remains unknown, their presence is still heavily swaying the discussion of something that predominantly affects younger generations, so it could be interpreted as marketing for e-cigarettes. In retrospect, bots’ prevalence in discussions such as this furthers the necessity of weariness on social media, especially with conversations as swaying as this one.