4 ms·
Headline is strange. The article itself says something similar but not the same: > But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots may account for bet
by gentleman11 6y ago
Headline is strange. The article itself says something similar but not the same:
> But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19.“
Edit: this was more interesting:
> not only were bots gaining traction and accumulating followers, but they accounted for 82% of the top 50 and 62% of the top 1,000 influential retweeters
- lowdose 6y agoCMU has published before that probably Russian adversaries fused different groups in the social graph of Facebook in 2016 and basically got in control of both groups after the merge. Bots are used to get attention, steer the conversation, introduce key retweeters to bot retweeters and merge a couple independent user groups at scale. This is a highly specialist job not a couple of random amateurs, and could be the underlying mechanism at work here. Big brands pay a fortune to execute similar tactics but are not even 10% as effective. Coke for example has an annual advertisement budget 7+ billion.