Up to 15 Percent of Twitter Accounts are Composed of Bots
Well great! Up to 15 Percent of Twitter Accounts are Composed of Bots, behind as many as 48 million Twitter accounts are probably not real people, but robots.
Do you get a lot of friends lately on Twitter? Do not rejoice too soon. Maybe it bots: automated (fake) accounts.
Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Indiana put 14 million Twitter accounts along a ruler.
For example, they checked how much time there was between tweets, network patterns and content of tweets. They are long gone more than 1150 issues.
On the basis of these checks, the researchers concluded that 9 to 15 percent of the accounts consist of bots. Even that 15 percent would be a conservative estimate, the scientists say, because they might have complex impact unfairly labeled as people.
And there is still a gray area: the bots that are still partly controlled by humans. The researchers did not know where to classify it.
The conclusion of the researchers, which consists of 15 percent of the accounts with bots, is entirely different than that of Twitter itself.
The company estimates the percentage of impact at most 8.5 percent. There are also accounts for example news automatically tweets. The number of pure spam accounts estimates the company at 5 percent.