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Oh, do I have notes on their methodology. 1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against

by g-clef 4y ago

Oh, do I have notes on their methodology. 1) They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. Frankly, until recently, my twitter account would have been one of the ones they would have discarded as inactive. This one thing alone makes me question all of the rest of their results. 2) By the same token, the rate or frequency with which a user sends tweets has no relation to whether a user is monetizable. If they're seeing ads, they're monetizable...lurkers are just as monetizable as high-volume posters.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always vastly outnumber people who post content on any platform. If lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5% and twitter’s “<5%” figure is accurate.
- hadlock 4y ago
  Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority, creates a sort of echo chamber. I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 4y ago
And yet I find 20% more believable then under 5% Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  All those fake followers you can buy could just aswell be "inactive" lurkers though.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Perhaps they are attempting to argue that the value comes from the users that generate content more so than the eyes attached to the account?
ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
100% this. I haven’t tweeted in nearly 3 years, and even that was a retweet. But I’m still logged in and consuming crap from Twitter all the time
- icecap12 4y ago
  Same, last tweet from me was in December and I check Twitter daily. My last self-composed tweet is well over 2 years ago.
prpl 4y ago
I was offered $300 for my twitter account, I suppose partially on the basis that I haven’t tweeted much, but I use it daily to weekly though don’t tweet often, one tweet in last 2 years or so.
dralley 4y ago
I have a twitter account, but I have never tweeted or retweeted anything.
- wil421 4y ago
  Same with my account. I only login from time to time when I am forced to sign in to view something.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    It sounds like you are genuinely a non-active user, and probably not interesting from the PoV of Twitter/acquirers or the GP poster. This thread is about lurkers: people who regularly log in and read their feed (thus consuming ads and being relevant from Twitter's business perspective), but who don't post and would thus be excluded using the methodology of TFA.
    - remram 4y ago
      Why do you say GP is non-active rather than lurking? They do read tweets, see ads, and even have an account that they log into.
loceng 4y ago
If it's the 80/20 rule then there's 4x of the other 80.58% that are lurking - which brings down % of fake/spam accounts.
sandworm101 4y ago
Lurkers are also the most important people. They consume the content. They are the meat of the business, the ones that respond to advertising and political messaging. If I were twitter I would champion all the lurker accounts, all the eyeballs to which twitter serves content. Nobody ever faulted the Nielson ratings scheme for "lurker" viewers who only watched but didn't themselves create television shows.
- r00fus 4y ago
  Furthermore, there are the non-tweeting active users (ones who like only) and the ones who RT a lot but don't create organic tweets. Those are indeed incredibly valuable. Engaged audience = your real audience.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Unlike passive media consumption though, Twitter needs users to submit content (tweets, replies) to give lurkers something to do.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Yes and no, just like any major media platform, huge majority of tweets being seen are from a very small group of influencers/popular person. That's why when you join twitter, it suggests to you a lot of people to follow that are already big.
    - brabel 4y ago
      There's only a yes in your answer.
      - FalconSensei 4y ago
        No. You can have only 10% of accounts actively tweeting and the rest just consuming what those post. All those - active and not - are monetizable
  - Hamuko 4y ago
Saint_Genet 4y ago
Doesn't have an url in profile is sort of a weird metric. Note everyone is there to self-promote
dylan604 4y ago
If an account is in lurk mode, then its not a spammer so I'm okay with it being left out of that equation. Where I might agree with you is a lurk mode account could become collateral damage in being considered fake. Lurkers don't retweet though. An account with a million followers isn't seen by everyone. Having a portion of that million like/retweet amplifies even further with their network now possibly seeing something from someone they are not following directly. I'd be willing to accept that the number of lurkers that get lumped in with fake accounts when deciding the percentage of actual eyeballs on posts is not harmful. Those numbers are made up stats anyways. Like the old days of TV/Radio stations that covered large cities with millions of citizens. They would claim they have an audience in the millions even though a small fraction were actually watching/listening.
- g-clef 4y ago
  Except the question isn't about the pure number of spam/bot accounts, it's about the ratio of spam/bots to "authentic" users. If you leave out the lurkers, that ratio gets skewed to mistakenly inflate the bot count.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    First off, I don't give 2 shits about twitter, so I don't care if the numbers are skewd in either direction. This is more of an interest in seeing how SV stats/metrics are just a game. Just so that's out there. A lurker isn't an active user in my opinion. Maybe that's not the same understanding as accepted definition. The lurkers might be absorbing some of the ad content, but they are not helping create new avenues for ads to be shared. Twitter's ad share surface area would increase tremendously if every user was actively producing tweets. That's the only metric that they are concerned. They don't care about how many people actually see the ads once they are there. They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      Why are lurkers not helping numbers? It's the exact same as Youtube, do you expect majority of lurkers on YouTube to not be counted because they didn't create a video? People follow what is already out there and ads target the people watching.
grumple 4y ago
My account was active until recently (deleted when Twitter accepted Musk's offer, I don't need to be a participant in a right wing cesspool). I have 0 tweets. I don't like things, because I don't want my name attached to someone else.
karxxm 4y ago
But one can say that 20% of the content on the platform was distributed by bots. Meaning that all the Lurkers have to consider if they are really interested in content, that was pushed by some bot-farms. Technically, every user of this platform has to take a step back and evaluate, if anything they have seen is not pushed content by some bots. 20% is huge and I am curios if there will ever be some comparable "official" numbers to that.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  No - you can say that 20% of the accounts actively posting are spam/bots. It's possible they are posting MUCH more or less than 20% of the content. If these are skewed toward the high end of producers - the 80/20 rule would say that as much as 80% of the content could come from them. Still - it's possible this content isn't interacted with much outside of other bots. You can't draw many conclusions from such a limited data point.
michaelt 4y ago
> That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again. Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?
- dado3212 4y ago
  They could maybe use like activity in addition to just tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then an external organization isn’t going to have insight into that.
- g-clef 4y ago
  As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data. That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
  - chomp 4y ago
    > Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data. It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings: >We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. >... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications. Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
    - frumper 4y ago
avs733 4y ago
their TL;DAbstract refers to this as a 'conservative' methodology, that is 'rigorous', and 'likely undercounts. Their definition: > “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.” They note the following to differentiate fake and spam: > Many “fake” accounts under this definition are neither nefarious nor problematic. ... By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance. Some general data analytics notes from their post: * Then lump together fake and spam in their analysis - and this really matters! somewhere like NYT is both 'fake' meaning it isn't a real person and A HIGHLY VALUABLE ACCOUNT for twitter to have. * They use a sample of 44,058 accounts (of ~1.047B) * They look at a number of classifying variables (17), spam accounts met 10+ of those 17 criteria. They don't list all 17. * The criteria were developed from a "machine learning process" that is undescribed, and was developed from a sample of 35,000 'known' fake twitter followers bought from 3 vendors and 50,000 claimed non-spam accounts. They appear (imply?) to have used 50% training 50% real data but dont't specify explicitly. * They say their model is about 65% accurate, and unlikely to produce false positives ("almost never includes false positives") - however they don't list any specificity, sensitivity, etc. that would be useful to evaluating that claim. * The analysis does no statistical tests, no confidence intervals, minimal information about how the model was tested or validated. * Critically: they note, but do not describe or quantify, that a lot of the criteria are highly correlated * then later in the article they suddenly seem to switch to a 10 point scale for quality away from their 17 point scale? with a threshold of 3 or below as low quality? * My personal twitter account meets most of the metrics where they have listed a quantifiable threshold. And their fake followers tool lists it as pretty f'ing suspicious - i.e., low quality. I'm not saying there wrong but I am saying good luck getting this from a blog post to any sort of respectable science publication. As they note at the end, they aren't even calculating the same metric - twitter uses monetizable daily active users - remember NYtimes? Absolutely a monetizable account - even if it isn't a real person. anyone who thinks this is proof of Elon's 4D chess based on this article is, to me, frankly delusional.
chaps 4y ago
Yeah, and I fully expect that these numbers went up recently with Twitter requiring login to view threads. The fact that they add a .42% is a red flag in itself, especially when they admit in their own post that they agree that their analysis is deserving of critique. Very misleading stuff. Their analysis using purchased bots seems a bit more reasonable.
Retric 4y ago
“Passive” accounts may actually be more likely to be bots as many services sell fake followers. It’s just harder to detect with public information rather than their IP addressees etc. Similarly I don’t think there is any way to separate active vs abandoned passive accounts as a 3rd party.
brightball 4y ago
Well, I've been actively trying to create a new Twitter account for a little under a month and Twitter thinks I'm a bot. I've made 1 tweet and followed 5 people. Even paid for Twitter Blue...still thinks I'm not real. Support is unreachable. My current plan is to wait til Elon completes the takeover and then build an entire site dedicated to getting Elon's attention to unlock my account...because that's the only way to contact somebody apparently.
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  Have you tried tweeting at them :P Edit add: I find it horrible that we have companies that you can not contact, in fact they seem to be going out of their way to make hard to contact them. Even things you pay money for, like airline tickets. They want you to email them, make the phone number hard to find. So you do, they don't respond and then you have to search and call them, wait an hour or more on hold. The agents are nice but the entire process is terrible. Earlier I had to do that for a damaged luggage claim. Went through the automated phone assistant to get to damaged luggage claims and it gave the option to use text messages. So I give it a try, nope. They can't resolve the issue through text, has to be on the phone. So I had to call back, re-enter all the info through the automated system and then ignore it's pleadings to use the text system.
soneca 4y ago
Turning on my cynicism switch on a bit. The author is a very good content marketer. A hot topic in our corner of the world — which is author’s target audience — is Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk tweeted that the percentage of bots is the main issue of the deal. He disputed Twitter’s number of 5%. I believe the author writing prompt was just: a headline about fake Twitter accounts showing a number significantly higher that 5%. That’s it. Whatever the methodology, that was the author’s goal. The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  > The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it. It's almost like Inception isn't it? A PR stunt within a PR stunt within a PR stunt.
infogulch 4y ago
You seem to be arguing against something that the article doesn't claim. The article isn't equating inactivity and fake/spam, but that: of the accounts that actively send tweets ~20% are fake/spam. Sure that's a different question from what proportion of all users are fake/spam, but this is still a perfectly valid question to ask, and the fact that they're only considering active users is in the title so I really don't get your complaint. If you want an analysis that attempts to answer a different question go find or write one that addresses the question you want answered... The article clearly states (emphasis mine): > This represents the largest set of accounts on Twitter we could acquire, but it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users). From the linked Twitter earnings report: > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.
- stdbrouw 4y ago
  It is valid criticism because the context of this article is that Elon Musk wants to know whether Twitter's own claims of ~5% fake/spam accounts is accurate. We do really want an analysis that investigates that precise question and not a related one.
  - LightG 4y ago
    Elon Musk waived his right to due dilligence ... more fool him. You can file this in the 'pedo guy' cabinet of his life story where his child-ego got the better of his undoubted business skills.
    - celdon25 4y ago
      He can do due diligence but from what I heard (correct me if I am wrong) he has to pay a heavy penalty ($1B) if he backs out.
pessimizer 4y ago
> lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. I've spent many, many hours lurking on twitter, don't have an account at all, and mostly access it through nitter instances. Are they "biased" for not including me? edit: should inactive users be counted as active users?
HWR_14 4y ago
They point out that's their definitions of active accounts is a flaw in their methodology (inside the article). However, I think it's fair to say that while TWTR has better internal insight into an "active user", it's the best approximation one can do from the outside. I do wonder about, given perfect knowledge, how the bot accounts would shake up. What percentage produce content (presumably propaganda, automatic tweets using it as an RSS like announcement service, and spam) vs follow people (boost follow accounts, sell likes)?
Timshel 4y ago
Probably forced to since they do not have access to login information. Especially since if you do not post but login you are certainly not a spammer ^^, could still be bot crawling. But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that less 50% of US users tweet five times a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75% as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using survey I believe so should include only active users and no spam/bot. So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that the 25% less active users might not even post every two month (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back a quarter of the 80% they found as active. Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example, but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done some good work ;).
mrtksn 4y ago
There was this suggestion to conduct a sting operation of displaying captcha to a sample of users to determine the % of the bots. Probably picking the sample is still challenging but at least can somewhat tell if the accounts in the sample are genuine. The method in this article is so flawed that Larry Ellison, founder of a famous law firm, would count as an inactive account since haven't tweeted since 2012[0] and that person apparently looks into investing in Twitter[1]. How can be investing a billion in Twitter when he doesn't use Twitter at all? [0]https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en [1]https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-ellison-only-tweeted-once-heres-why-hes-pouring-1-billion-into-elon-musks-twitter-bid/ https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-elliso...
soheil 4y ago
> They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), This is not their definition, that's what Twitter considers an active account in their revenue reports. > has no relation It has some relation, no? I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between how frequently a user sends tweets and how monetizable that user is.
hammock 4y ago
>They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. All true. However, do you really believe that a bot is more likely to be active than a real user? If so, fair play to you. If not, then we would expect inactive users to be bots in an even greater proportion than what we see among active users.
kokanee 4y ago
We can argue about what the article did and didn't imply, but what's interesting to me about the issue you raise is that among lurkers there is probably a much lower rate of fake/spam activity, since there are fewer reasons for a bot to log in and not tweet. Couple that with the fact that lurkers are generally the vast majority of users on any platform, and that alone could explain the discrepancy between Twitter's 5% number and SparkToro's 20%.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  Services that sell followers and spammers "aging" accounts generally would look like lurkers. Twitter could probably get an accurate estimate with the amount of analytics they have for internal use only, but of course they might be incentivized to not try very hard.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
daenz 4y ago
That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots. The bots are having a huge influence on conversations, and that's important to know.
- raydev 4y ago
  > That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots I don't see how you can arrive at this conclusion. It depends on who you are following, with some additions by the algorithm (unless you use the chronological feed) and (speculating here) the algo pushes content from real humans.
  - daenz 4y ago
    I read tweet replies, not just tweets (apologies if I'm not using the correct terms, I'm not an active Twitter user). The original tweet may be a real user, but I often dive deep into all of the comments. If 20% of those comments are from bots, then that's a lot.
- matsemann 4y ago
  No, since you choose who you follow, you're most likely filtering for interesting stuff. I'd wager that most of the spam bots are pretty obvious to spot, and makes up very little of a user's feed.
  - daenz 4y ago
    I rarely read my feed. Most of my lurking is on the replies to famous/infamous tweets.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I don't know how many original tweets are made by bots but 20% of the replies to anyone with a 5 figure follower count seems to fall on the low side of what I would guess.

by g-clef 4y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

And I thought it was common knowledge that lurkers always vastly outnumber people who post content on any platform. If lurkers outnumber posters by at least 3:1, then 20% goes to 5% and twitter’s “<5%” figure is accurate.

hadlock 4y ago
Lurkers are probably anywhere between 8-12:1. People actually posting stuff on the internet are in the vast, vast minority, creates a sort of echo chamber. I am technically "logged into" twitter so I can click through and read the postage stamp-sized charts linked to through various articles and blogs, or watch a video about a riot in some far flung part of the planet. Once a year I tweet at airlines when they lose my luggage or whatever but otherwise don't tweet. Twitter isn't a good social media service, it just happens to be the image/video sharing platform of choice for journalists to promote themselves.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 4y ago

And yet I find 20% more believable then under 5% Edit: I guess it's true that lurkers won't be bots, unless they are clicking on ads or trying to simulate engagement to help certain twitter accounts seem popular.

rightbyte 4y ago
All those fake followers you can buy could just aswell be "inactive" lurkers though.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

Perhaps they are attempting to argue that the value comes from the users that generate content more so than the eyes attached to the account?

ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago

100% this. I haven’t tweeted in nearly 3 years, and even that was a retweet. But I’m still logged in and consuming crap from Twitter all the time

icecap12 4y ago
Same, last tweet from me was in December and I check Twitter daily. My last self-composed tweet is well over 2 years ago.

prpl 4y ago

I was offered $300 for my twitter account, I suppose partially on the basis that I haven’t tweeted much, but I use it daily to weekly though don’t tweet often, one tweet in last 2 years or so.

dralley 4y ago

I have a twitter account, but I have never tweeted or retweeted anything.

wil421 4y ago
Same with my account. I only login from time to time when I am forced to sign in to view something.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  It sounds like you are genuinely a non-active user, and probably not interesting from the PoV of Twitter/acquirers or the GP poster. This thread is about lurkers: people who regularly log in and read their feed (thus consuming ads and being relevant from Twitter's business perspective), but who don't post and would thus be excluded using the methodology of TFA.
  - remram 4y ago
    Why do you say GP is non-active rather than lurking? They do read tweets, see ads, and even have an account that they log into.

loceng 4y ago

If it's the 80/20 rule then there's 4x of the other 80.58% that are lurking - which brings down % of fake/spam accounts.

sandworm101 4y ago

Lurkers are also the most important people. They consume the content. They are the meat of the business, the ones that respond to advertising and political messaging. If I were twitter I would champion all the lurker accounts, all the eyeballs to which twitter serves content. Nobody ever faulted the Nielson ratings scheme for "lurker" viewers who only watched but didn't themselves create television shows.

r00fus 4y ago
Furthermore, there are the non-tweeting active users (ones who like only) and the ones who RT a lot but don't create organic tweets. Those are indeed incredibly valuable. Engaged audience = your real audience.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Unlike passive media consumption though, Twitter needs users to submit content (tweets, replies) to give lurkers something to do.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Yes and no, just like any major media platform, huge majority of tweets being seen are from a very small group of influencers/popular person. That's why when you join twitter, it suggests to you a lot of people to follow that are already big.
  - brabel 4y ago
    There's only a yes in your answer.
    - FalconSensei 4y ago
      No. You can have only 10% of accounts actively tweeting and the rest just consuming what those post. All those - active and not - are monetizable
- Hamuko 4y ago

Saint_Genet 4y ago

Doesn't have an url in profile is sort of a weird metric. Note everyone is there to self-promote

dylan604 4y ago

If an account is in lurk mode, then its not a spammer so I'm okay with it being left out of that equation. Where I might agree with you is a lurk mode account could become collateral damage in being considered fake. Lurkers don't retweet though. An account with a million followers isn't seen by everyone. Having a portion of that million like/retweet amplifies even further with their network now possibly seeing something from someone they are not following directly. I'd be willing to accept that the number of lurkers that get lumped in with fake accounts when deciding the percentage of actual eyeballs on posts is not harmful. Those numbers are made up stats anyways. Like the old days of TV/Radio stations that covered large cities with millions of citizens. They would claim they have an audience in the millions even though a small fraction were actually watching/listening.

g-clef 4y ago
Except the question isn't about the pure number of spam/bot accounts, it's about the ratio of spam/bots to "authentic" users. If you leave out the lurkers, that ratio gets skewed to mistakenly inflate the bot count.
- dylan604 4y ago
  First off, I don't give 2 shits about twitter, so I don't care if the numbers are skewd in either direction. This is more of an interest in seeing how SV stats/metrics are just a game. Just so that's out there. A lurker isn't an active user in my opinion. Maybe that's not the same understanding as accepted definition. The lurkers might be absorbing some of the ad content, but they are not helping create new avenues for ads to be shared. Twitter's ad share surface area would increase tremendously if every user was actively producing tweets. That's the only metric that they are concerned. They don't care about how many people actually see the ads once they are there. They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Why are lurkers not helping numbers? It's the exact same as Youtube, do you expect majority of lurkers on YouTube to not be counted because they didn't create a video? People follow what is already out there and ads target the people watching.

grumple 4y ago

My account was active until recently (deleted when Twitter accepted Musk's offer, I don't need to be a participant in a right wing cesspool). I have 0 tweets. I don't like things, because I don't want my name attached to someone else.

karxxm 4y ago

But one can say that 20% of the content on the platform was distributed by bots. Meaning that all the Lurkers have to consider if they are really interested in content, that was pushed by some bot-farms. Technically, every user of this platform has to take a step back and evaluate, if anything they have seen is not pushed content by some bots. 20% is huge and I am curios if there will ever be some comparable "official" numbers to that.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
No - you can say that 20% of the accounts actively posting are spam/bots. It's possible they are posting MUCH more or less than 20% of the content. If these are skewed toward the high end of producers - the 80/20 rule would say that as much as 80% of the content could come from them. Still - it's possible this content isn't interacted with much outside of other bots. You can't draw many conclusions from such a limited data point.

michaelt 4y ago

> That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist I created an account 5 years ago, followed one or two people, got bored and never logged in again. Presumably their intention is to exclude abandoned accounts, like mine - is there any way they, viewing Twitter externally, could tell lurker accounts like yours and abandoned accounts like mine apart?

dado3212 4y ago
They could maybe use like activity in addition to just tweets? Inherently though this system is going to be less accurate than the dataset that Twitter has access to. If a large chunk of users only engage in Twitter through DMs then an external organization isn’t going to have insight into that.
g-clef 4y ago
As a third party? Probably not. Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data. That's part of why I find articles like this frustrating: I don't think they have the data to actually answer they question they're attempting to answer. Knowing that, what's the purpose of the article?
- chomp 4y ago
  > Which is why it's going to be very hard to disprove Twitter's assertion unless Twitter chooses to share their data. It's impossible to disprove Twitter's assertion because they never claimed that less than 5% of their accounts are spam. From their quarterly earnings: >We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. >... mDAU does not include users accessing Twitter through third-party applications. Their statement said that less than 5% of their monetizeable daily active users are spam. There very well could be 50% of the entire user base as bots or spam, but that doesn't negate the metric Twitter releases.
  - frumper 4y ago

avs733 4y ago

their TL;DAbstract refers to this as a 'conservative' methodology, that is 'rigorous', and 'likely undercounts. Their definition: > “Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.” They note the following to differentiate fake and spam: > Many “fake” accounts under this definition are neither nefarious nor problematic. ... By contrast, most “spam” accounts are an unwanted nuisance. Some general data analytics notes from their post: * Then lump together fake and spam in their analysis - and this really matters! somewhere like NYT is both 'fake' meaning it isn't a real person and A HIGHLY VALUABLE ACCOUNT for twitter to have. * They use a sample of 44,058 accounts (of ~1.047B) * They look at a number of classifying variables (17), spam accounts met 10+ of those 17 criteria. They don't list all 17. * The criteria were developed from a "machine learning process" that is undescribed, and was developed from a sample of 35,000 'known' fake twitter followers bought from 3 vendors and 50,000 claimed non-spam accounts. They appear (imply?) to have used 50% training 50% real data but dont't specify explicitly. * They say their model is about 65% accurate, and unlikely to produce false positives ("almost never includes false positives") - however they don't list any specificity, sensitivity, etc. that would be useful to evaluating that claim. * The analysis does no statistical tests, no confidence intervals, minimal information about how the model was tested or validated. * Critically: they note, but do not describe or quantify, that a lot of the criteria are highly correlated * then later in the article they suddenly seem to switch to a 10 point scale for quality away from their 17 point scale? with a threshold of 3 or below as low quality? * My personal twitter account meets most of the metrics where they have listed a quantifiable threshold. And their fake followers tool lists it as pretty f'ing suspicious - i.e., low quality. I'm not saying there wrong but I am saying good luck getting this from a blog post to any sort of respectable science publication. As they note at the end, they aren't even calculating the same metric - twitter uses monetizable daily active users - remember NYtimes? Absolutely a monetizable account - even if it isn't a real person. anyone who thinks this is proof of Elon's 4D chess based on this article is, to me, frankly delusional.

chaps 4y ago

Yeah, and I fully expect that these numbers went up recently with Twitter requiring login to view threads. The fact that they add a .42% is a red flag in itself, especially when they admit in their own post that they agree that their analysis is deserving of critique. Very misleading stuff. Their analysis using purchased bots seems a bit more reasonable.

Retric 4y ago

“Passive” accounts may actually be more likely to be bots as many services sell fake followers. It’s just harder to detect with public information rather than their IP addressees etc. Similarly I don’t think there is any way to separate active vs abandoned passive accounts as a 3rd party.

brightball 4y ago

Well, I've been actively trying to create a new Twitter account for a little under a month and Twitter thinks I'm a bot. I've made 1 tweet and followed 5 people. Even paid for Twitter Blue...still thinks I'm not real. Support is unreachable. My current plan is to wait til Elon completes the takeover and then build an entire site dedicated to getting Elon's attention to unlock my account...because that's the only way to contact somebody apparently.

themaninthedark 4y ago
Have you tried tweeting at them :P Edit add: I find it horrible that we have companies that you can not contact, in fact they seem to be going out of their way to make hard to contact them. Even things you pay money for, like airline tickets. They want you to email them, make the phone number hard to find. So you do, they don't respond and then you have to search and call them, wait an hour or more on hold. The agents are nice but the entire process is terrible. Earlier I had to do that for a damaged luggage claim. Went through the automated phone assistant to get to damaged luggage claims and it gave the option to use text messages. So I give it a try, nope. They can't resolve the issue through text, has to be on the phone. So I had to call back, re-enter all the info through the automated system and then ignore it's pleadings to use the text system.

soneca 4y ago

Turning on my cynicism switch on a bit. The author is a very good content marketer. A hot topic in our corner of the world — which is author’s target audience — is Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk tweeted that the percentage of bots is the main issue of the deal. He disputed Twitter’s number of 5%. I believe the author writing prompt was just: a headline about fake Twitter accounts showing a number significantly higher that 5%. That’s it. Whatever the methodology, that was the author’s goal. The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
> The article achieved this goal. Otherwise is completely irrelevant. Even for the person who wrote it. It's almost like Inception isn't it? A PR stunt within a PR stunt within a PR stunt.

infogulch 4y ago

You seem to be arguing against something that the article doesn't claim. The article isn't equating inactivity and fake/spam, but that: of the accounts that actively send tweets ~20% are fake/spam. Sure that's a different question from what proportion of all users are fake/spam, but this is still a perfectly valid question to ask, and the fact that they're only considering active users is in the title so I really don't get your complaint. If you want an analysis that attempts to answer a different question go find or write one that addresses the question you want answered... The article clearly states (emphasis mine): > This represents the largest set of accounts on Twitter we could acquire, but it includes analysis of many older accounts that haven’t sent tweets in the last 90 days and thus, likely don’t fit Twitter’s definition of mDAUs (monetizable Daily Active Users). From the linked Twitter earnings report: > We define monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads. EDIT: rephrased "accounts that are active" to "accounts that actively send tweets" to clarify what the article addresses.

stdbrouw 4y ago
It is valid criticism because the context of this article is that Elon Musk wants to know whether Twitter's own claims of ~5% fake/spam accounts is accurate. We do really want an analysis that investigates that precise question and not a related one.
- LightG 4y ago
  Elon Musk waived his right to due dilligence ... more fool him. You can file this in the 'pedo guy' cabinet of his life story where his child-ego got the better of his undoubted business skills.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    He can do due diligence but from what I heard (correct me if I am wrong) he has to pay a heavy penalty ($1B) if he backs out.

pessimizer 4y ago

> lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. I've spent many, many hours lurking on twitter, don't have an account at all, and mostly access it through nitter instances. Are they "biased" for not including me? edit: should inactive users be counted as active users?

HWR_14 4y ago

They point out that's their definitions of active accounts is a flaw in their methodology (inside the article). However, I think it's fair to say that while TWTR has better internal insight into an "active user", it's the best approximation one can do from the outside. I do wonder about, given perfect knowledge, how the bot accounts would shake up. What percentage produce content (presumably propaganda, automatic tweets using it as an RSS like announcement service, and spam) vs follow people (boost follow accounts, sell likes)?

Timshel 4y ago

Probably forced to since they do not have access to login information. Especially since if you do not post but login you are certainly not a spammer ^^, could still be bot crawling. But they probably should expand more on this and reflect on how much inaccuracy it adds. With a quick search you can find that less 50% of US users tweet five times a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo...). Or the study which, reported that the top 25% of user produce 97% of the content, the median user of the bottom 75% as posting 0 tweet a month (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...). Those studies were done using survey I believe so should include only active users and no spam/bot. So with random invalid maths, if you make the assumption that the 25% less active users might not even post every two month (exponential decrease of activity ?) then you need to add back a quarter of the 80% they found as active. Not to say I believe the 5% number from twitter; and I was going to use the price for a thousands follower as an example, but seeing it appears to be at 30$ now (https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ https://socialboss.org/buy-twitter-followers/ ?) when I remembered it at like 5$ then the twitter team might have done some good work ;).

mrtksn 4y ago

There was this suggestion to conduct a sting operation of displaying captcha to a sample of users to determine the % of the bots. Probably picking the sample is still challenging but at least can somewhat tell if the accounts in the sample are genuine. The method in this article is so flawed that Larry Ellison, founder of a famous law firm, would count as an inactive account since haven't tweeted since 2012[0] and that person apparently looks into investing in Twitter[1]. How can be investing a billion in Twitter when he doesn't use Twitter at all? [0]https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en https://twitter.com/larryellison?lang=en [1]https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-ellison-only-tweeted-once-heres-why-hes-pouring-1-billion-into-elon-musks-twitter-bid/ https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/16/larry-elliso...

soheil 4y ago

> They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), This is not their definition, that's what Twitter considers an active account in their revenue reports. > has no relation It has some relation, no? I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between how frequently a user sends tweets and how monetizable that user is.

hammock 4y ago

>They talk about "active" accounts (meaning have tweeted in the last 9 weeks), and do a bunch of filtering against that. That seems like a huge bias - lurkers exist, and in my experience are usually the majority of users...this step removes them or ignores them entirely. All true. However, do you really believe that a bot is more likely to be active than a real user? If so, fair play to you. If not, then we would expect inactive users to be bots in an even greater proportion than what we see among active users.

kokanee 4y ago

We can argue about what the article did and didn't imply, but what's interesting to me about the issue you raise is that among lurkers there is probably a much lower rate of fake/spam activity, since there are fewer reasons for a bot to log in and not tweet. Couple that with the fact that lurkers are generally the vast majority of users on any platform, and that alone could explain the discrepancy between Twitter's 5% number and SparkToro's 20%.

pseudo0 4y ago
Services that sell followers and spammers "aging" accounts generally would look like lurkers. Twitter could probably get an accurate estimate with the amount of analytics they have for internal use only, but of course they might be incentivized to not try very hard.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

daenz 4y ago

That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots. The bots are having a huge influence on conversations, and that's important to know.

raydev 4y ago
> That means that 20% of the posts that I see, as a lurker, are generated by bots I don't see how you can arrive at this conclusion. It depends on who you are following, with some additions by the algorithm (unless you use the chronological feed) and (speculating here) the algo pushes content from real humans.
- daenz 4y ago
  I read tweet replies, not just tweets (apologies if I'm not using the correct terms, I'm not an active Twitter user). The original tweet may be a real user, but I often dive deep into all of the comments. If 20% of those comments are from bots, then that's a lot.
matsemann 4y ago
No, since you choose who you follow, you're most likely filtering for interesting stuff. I'd wager that most of the spam bots are pretty obvious to spot, and makes up very little of a user's feed.
- daenz 4y ago
  I rarely read my feed. Most of my lurking is on the replies to famous/infamous tweets.
brewdad 4y ago
I don't know how many original tweets are made by bots but 20% of the replies to anyone with a 5 figure follower count seems to fall on the low side of what I would guess.