Blame bots if you lose lot of followers on Twitter
Most common spam violations is the use of multiple accounts, and the Twitter developer platform which attempts to inflate the prominence of certain Tweets.
If you have lost a lot of followers on Twitter recently, it means you had a lot of bots as followers. It is not just jobs that automation or robots are impacting; they are influencing people’s thoughts on social media.
The Internet has evolved from being concerned about spam emails to issues around spam posts. A social networking bots commonly referred to as bots is like a software program that runs automated tasks on the internet.
Typically, Twitter bots perform tasks like tweet, retweet, like, follow, unfollow, or send direct message to other accounts faster than human beings. In the world of social media, more number of likes or retweets signifies the person to be influential.
The success of a person on Twitter is directly proportional to the number of followers and retweets. Some bots are useful like those that tweet health tips, weather forecasts, feeds from websites and the Hyderabad Fuel Bot which goes by the id @hydfuel and tweets the Hyderabad fuel price every day.
However, lately, they are being used to automatically post provoking or illogical posts just to annoy users. There are few set of internet people who are abysmal and bots are allowing them to augment their power.
Yoel Roth, a Twitter developer, noted in a blog post, “One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain Tweets.”
Consequently, Twitter is cracking down on such bots because of which some people have seen a reduction in the number of followers.
According to the new policy, ‘the use of any form of automation to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across many accounts that have authorised your app is not permitted.’
Often bots tend to distort the debate in favour of, or against someone by constantly tweeting. It may be mentioned here that the government listens to social media conversations to understand the pulse of people on a particular initiative. Because of use of bots, they are not able to get the right feedback. According to a press information bureau official, “Bots and fake accounts tend to corrupt the data our software tries to read about a particular initiative. The software is unable to differentiate between a bot and a real person.”