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> On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics – bots we

by awb 7y ago

> On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon. For those wondering, it's estimated that 9-15% of all tweets come from bots (https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-bots/ https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/new-study-says-almost-1...), so there is an estimated ~2x typical bot volume on this topic. However, it would be nice to know their reach. It's not clear if these bot tweets on climate are being liked, retweeted and followed or mostly ignored.

archi42 7y ago
Careful: It's not clear if the 9 to 15% number covers bots overall or only the relevant subgroup for disinformation campaigns. Though I suppose it's more likely to plainly cover ALL bots. Now lets wildly assume 6 to 10 %-points of these are actually not disguised as humans and are not setup with the intent to mislead (e.g. think automatic service status tweets), then the average "bot disguised as genuine human"-rate for any topic would be below the 10% range - which in turn makes the 25% much more bleak.
- deleted 7y ago
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- kick 7y ago
  There are like three dozen twitter bots that automatically repost HN posts, and there are like ten thousand twitter bots that automatically repost popular reddit posts. A single post getting to the front page of both will get you a hundred thousand tweets in ten minutes. They don't seem to have linked the study, so I can't check if they controlled for that, but it's such a common use case that I really hope they did.
legitster 7y ago
Even if they are not being retweeted, I believe they can still affect what hashtags are trending. And then human nature caused more, real people to jump in.

by awb 7y ago

archi42 7y ago

Careful: It's not clear if the 9 to 15% number covers bots overall or only the relevant subgroup for disinformation campaigns. Though I suppose it's more likely to plainly cover ALL bots. Now lets wildly assume 6 to 10 %-points of these are actually not disguised as humans and are not setup with the intent to mislead (e.g. think automatic service status tweets), then the average "bot disguised as genuine human"-rate for any topic would be below the 10% range - which in turn makes the 25% much more bleak.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kick 7y ago
There are like three dozen twitter bots that automatically repost HN posts, and there are like ten thousand twitter bots that automatically repost popular reddit posts. A single post getting to the front page of both will get you a hundred thousand tweets in ten minutes. They don't seem to have linked the study, so I can't check if they controlled for that, but it's such a common use case that I really hope they did.

legitster 7y ago

Even if they are not being retweeted, I believe they can still affect what hashtags are trending. And then human nature caused more, real people to jump in.