A research conducted by teams from the university of Southern California and Indiana University both in the United States has found that about 48 million profiles representing 15 of Twitter’s 319 million active monthly users are bots not real people.
The new number is nearly double the number Twitter filed in 2014 when it was estimated that between 5 to 8.5 percent of users were actually bots.
The researchers from the two universities used over 1000 features to identify bot accounts on Twitter, in categories including friends, tweet content and sentiment and time between tweets.
“Our estimates suggest that between 9 per cent and 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots,” a spokesperson for the team said.
Specifically, a bot is an application that performs an automated task, such as setting an alarm, telling users the weather or conducting search online. According to the researchers, it is possible that complex bots may have shown up as humans in their model, “making even the 15 percent figure a conservative estimate.”
“Many social bots perform useful functions, such as dissemination of news and publications. However, there is a growing record of malicious applications of social bots. Some emulate human behaviour to manufacture fake grassroots political support and promote terrorist propaganda and recruitment,” they said.
The issue of fake Twitter accounts resurfaced during the US Presidential election in 2016, when researchers from the United Kingdom claimed they uncovered interconnected bot networks, with the largest incorporating some 500,000 fake accounts. Later reports suggested that Donald Trump may have benefited from bots which were retweeting pro-Trump messages, thereby increasing his share of voice and boosting his messages over Hillary Clinton.
In a filing last month, Twitter said that up to 8.5 percent of all accounts contacted Twitter’s servers “without any discernible additional user-initiated action.”
The revelation presents a dilemma for user growth on the platform. A recent research report, Nomura Instinet analysts wrote “Twitter’s revenue growth has slowed to the mid-single digits, as the platform has struggled to attract new users over the past year.”
A Twitter spokesperson dismissed the negative connotations of the bot existence, “Many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters or from customer service points of view.”
The University of California researchers also buttressed the point stating that “many social bots perform useful functions, such as dissemination of news and publications.”
