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Once our tweet used a popular hash tag and got re-tweeted by some bot network. It was really easy to tell the accounts were all bots, all the re-tweets happened
by mixedbit 9y ago
Once our tweet used a popular hash tag and got re-tweeted by some bot network. It was really easy to tell the accounts were all bots, all the re-tweets happened simultaneously, profiles were very similar, with similar messy streams.
I went into trouble of reporting each of the fake accounts manually (the UI for this is far from convenient). After some time I checked the bot accounts again. None of them was deleted, our original tweet still had a large re-tweets count, which basically misleads the real Tweeter users, making the tweet look more interesting that it really was.
From this incident I no longer look at re-tweets as any reliable metric of popularity or quality of tweeted content.
- dawnerd 9y agoFlip side, it's realllly easy to tell when businesses hire botnets to push up their follower count in hopes of being verified. If an account has tens-hundreds of thousands of followers and no interactions from them, save to assume its all faked. Whats sad is twitter seems to verify them without actually looking.
- enzanki_ars 9y agoBut how can you tell if the bots are actually hired by the company? What if it was someone outside the company trying to influence Twitter for their own purposes?
- mattbeckman 9y agoWell, botnets and incentivized users are hard to tell apart. Incentivized users often appear to be bots, as their sole purpose for using Twitter is to get something from companies that want the numbers, and they often don't even bother setting a profile photo, or doing anything but retweet promotions.