Is The Twitterverse Full Of Bots?

[tommymaczoidberg]

Twitter is going to be 7 years old soon. There are around 400 posts daily and somewhere around 2 billion posts per week. That's a lot tweets.

The thing that bothers me is that there are some 500 million twitter accounts, yet only about 140 million of them are active. And many of the more popular Twitter accounts have around 27% fake followers. These sort of feels like a Twitter-bubble to me. As if people are using Twitter due to a sense of popularity that isn't really real. Clearly, Twitter is going to have to do something to address the issues. Problem is, how will those solutions affect us who rely on our Twitter popularity? Will we see a decrease in followers? If we do, what effect will that have on us?

 

[BigBigFan]

It is very full of bots and most of them belong to blogs and news sites who want to aggregate specific information and share it with their readers. Celebrity accounts have hundreds of bots crawling their profiles hourly just to grab tweets instantly.

I think there was an article a while back that said it would be the undoing of Twitter but it seems to help spread tweets and so they don't stop most bots.

 

[invisibled]

I encounter bots on twitter all the time. And there are countless number of twitter bots on the net nowdays, so i really do hope that twitter management does something about it.
I think they also have some sort of confirmation websites where the person adding you needs to type in a specific captcha or something.

 

[tommymaczoidberg]

I think there was an article a while back that said it would be the undoing of Twitter but it seems to help spread tweets and so they don't stop most bots.

I think it would be too. Twitter is sort of like that guy in your office who sits there and you're not sure exactly what he does all day. But, for some reason, he makes twice as much as you do.

 

[Tara]

First, Twitter is going to be 7 years old! Wow, has it really been that long?

Yes, the Twitterverse if full of bots. Twitter has been working hard to clean up the system, but there still are plenty of bots out there. I don't think Twitter will be able to get rid of them completely. There are genius marketers with great programming skills determined to stay one step ahead.

 

[tommymaczoidberg]

First, Twitter is going to be 7 years old! Wow, has it really been that long?

Yes, the Twitterverse if full of bots. Twitter has been working hard to clean up the system, but there still are plenty of bots out there. I don't think Twitter will be able to get rid of them completely. There are genius marketers with great programming skills determined to stay one step ahead.

They're such geniuses that they neglect to add a profile pic to their bots. That seems to be the most major indication that the person following you might not be an actual person. Wow! This person follows 15,000 people, has 200 followers, repeats tweets on a monthly basis and has no profile picture? Of course it's legit!

 

[Tara]

They're such geniuses that they neglect to add a profile pic to their bots.

Those are the ones that get caught. There are plenty of others who don't.

That seems to be the most major indication that the person following you might not be an actual person. Wow! This person follows 15,000 people, has 200 followers, repeats tweets on a monthly basis and has no profile picture? Of course it's legit!

Good points.

 

[Jessi]

Bots happen. Spam happens.

I don't think that people are using it under some false pretense that it's popular when it isn't, though. It *is* popular and there are millions of real users there that keep it that way.

 

[BigBigFan]

content aggregation and mashup happens too.

Big brands want to aggregate, digest and release all information they can get their mits on to attract readers and no source is beyond scraping. I've been scraped by Yahoo even and the pieces of my content being taken are always shoved onto pages with a lot of other content.

Sadly Google often feels that my content, especially my images, belong to other sites as they often rank them ahead of me for my own stuff.

 

[appleannie123]

I hope this will not have an affect on my Twitter followers. All my followers are real as far as I know. I use TwitClub. I am about to use Auto Follow. I just cannot sit there and click on one thousand people at random daily. I have other avenues to explore.

Wow, Twitter is only 7.

 

[Jessi]

Wow, Twitter is only 7.

Lmao!

It's funny that you say it that way. I just recently looked it up and thought "Wow, Twitter has been around for 7 years already! That's crazy!!"

 

[neoflip]

Are you kidding to me? :O
27% fake... ooh my goodness. unbelievable

 

[bsge11]

I have seen many tweets that aren't really relevant. Mostly just spam, probably from these bots or fake followers. I can't believe myself that twitter is that old. It did start getting big maybe 2 0r 3 years ago when the media was using it.