Research results that up to 48 million accounts of Twitter users are bots

ByLu_lu

While Twitter, which is used by many people around the world, continues to send out a lot of information daily, the fact that 48 million accounts, which is actually 15% of active users, is not a real human being but a computer program bot The result was announced.

Almost 48 million Twitter accounts are are bots - Axios
https://www.axios.com/15-of-twitter-is-bots-2311884069.html

The joint research team of the University of Southern California and Indiana University will collect metadata such as various data published about Twitter, the number of users and tweets for each Twitter account, emotional expression, network pattern, active time axis situation Investigate the actual condition of account using. As a result, Twitter's MAU (Monthly Active User: monthly active user) accounts for approximately 319 million accounts, while 9% to 15% of it is known to be a bot. When it is corrected to the actual number of accounts, it is about 2.9 million to about 4.79 million accounts, which is comparable to the population of the whole state of California in America.

With simple calculation, when there are 100 followers of Twitter, the result that the maximum 15 bot is the bot turned out, but the contents are both problematic and not exist It is said that there is. Although there are bots that induce public opinion in a wrong direction that is different from the actual by flowing fake news, there are also bots that automatically spread the information useful for users and disaster prevention information, so bots Of course it is not a good judgment to judge that all of them are bad.

ByThe Magic Tuba Pixie

However, this result shows that there is a challenge elsewhere. The fact that not less than a few accounts are moved by computers rather than by humans includes the possibility that the credibility of "number of users" data published by Twitter and others will be shaken. And this is not just about whether Twitter knows the correct data, but also the credibility of the basic data such as the number of users that form the basis of the advertising products that the company sells and the behavior patterns of users I have a risk that questions can be cast.

Papers by research groups can be referred to from the following links.

(PDF)Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization