There's a sizable industry selling followers to people on social media. There's video from china of walls of phones for this purpose. Not everyone followed by bots bought them, they randomly follow some people to seem more legitimate.
There's users with multiple accounts. Twitter was supposed to be combining these accounts together and reporting a single user as a single account, but after Musk's agreement, they reported that there was a "bug" and they were reporting them as separate users.
Many governments or influence organizations have accounts they use to push narratives. These are a second type of bot. It's why you sometimes see the same account posting the same thing. Sometimes these are copy-paste jobs, sometimes it's AI, and sometimes its an agent is posting directly.
I don't think this counts, but there's also an dead accounts. Legitimately made accounts that a user abandoned. Same user might have also abandoned Twitter and decided to live a real life, or actually died.
Good post.
Years ago I worked for a company who advertised on a station that played Rush Limbaugh. I helped with social media and after he said something about the border we started getting hundreds of the same tweet demanding we boycott from a bunch of accounts that didn't appear to be legitimate (generic profile pic, no personal info, etc) and were also scheduled to be sent at the same interval. The "Russian Bots" trend always made me laugh after this.
I've also always found the amount of 40-60 year old women who have 100,000+ tweets only to right leaning political pundits/politicians that make very little sense in context to be puzzling and reeking of bot astroturfing.
Just what constitutes a 'fake' account, anyway?
There's a sizable industry selling followers to people on social media. There's video from china of walls of phones for this purpose. Not everyone followed by bots bought them, they randomly follow some people to seem more legitimate.
There's users with multiple accounts. Twitter was supposed to be combining these accounts together and reporting a single user as a single account, but after Musk's agreement, they reported that there was a "bug" and they were reporting them as separate users.
Many governments or influence organizations have accounts they use to push narratives. These are a second type of bot. It's why you sometimes see the same account posting the same thing. Sometimes these are copy-paste jobs, sometimes it's AI, and sometimes its an agent is posting directly.
I don't think this counts, but there's also an dead accounts. Legitimately made accounts that a user abandoned. Same user might have also abandoned Twitter and decided to live a real life, or actually died.
Good post. Years ago I worked for a company who advertised on a station that played Rush Limbaugh. I helped with social media and after he said something about the border we started getting hundreds of the same tweet demanding we boycott from a bunch of accounts that didn't appear to be legitimate (generic profile pic, no personal info, etc) and were also scheduled to be sent at the same interval. The "Russian Bots" trend always made me laugh after this.
I've also always found the amount of 40-60 year old women who have 100,000+ tweets only to right leaning political pundits/politicians that make very little sense in context to be puzzling and reeking of bot astroturfing.