Bots Invasion

A study by the University of Southern California and Indiana University suggests that about 9-15 per cent of active accounts on Twitter are bots. Twitter currently has 319 million monthly active users and 15 per cent of this figure would amount to 48 million profiles on the social networking site. The research used more than 1,000 features across six categories and analysed user accounts for profile appearance, content produced and retweeted, and interactions with other users in terms of retweets and mentions, to decide whether the profile was used by a bot or a human. In a recent filing to US Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter had said that about 8.5 per cent (27 million) of its users are automated accounts – a figure it had given in 2014, too. Other studies, however, have pegged the number to be higher.