How much of Twitter is made up of bots? We now have the answer
It’s pretty easy to build a bot these days, or use third-parties to automatically scrape content and re-tweet it. So Twitterverse, how many of your tweets are connecting with people vs. bots?
A study done by USC and Indiana U. says that as many as 1 in 7 interactions may be bots. Somewhere between 9% and 15% of Twitter accounts are non-human, according to the study. Actually, the study said it could well be more, due to sophisticated bots they haven’t detected yet.
“We do not exclude the possibility that very sophisticated bots can systematically escape a human annotator’s judgement. These complex bots may be active on Twitter, and therefore present in our datasets, and may have been incorrectly labeled as humans, making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate.” — Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University & Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California study
In addition, the study talks about “Cyborg” accounts which are typically bots with some human interaction. Those are counted in the study.
Hmm. Statistica says there are 319 million current twitter users. So that would mean something like 47.8 MILLION of them are bots not people. So, are you interacting with a real person or a bot?
And if it’s a bot, is it subject to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics?”
