Research: 9 to 15 percent of monthly active Twitter accounts are bots

9 to 15 percent of monthly active accounts on Twitter may be controlled by bots. That’s according to researchers at the University of South California. That equates to roughly 30 to 48 million accounts.

The researchers have developed their own model to map the behavior of bots. For example, it looks at following behaviour, content of tweets and the times of activity. In addition, the model is further ‘trained’ because the researchers manually went through a collection of Twitter users and gave all accounts the correct stamp. Overall, the researchers say the 9 to 15 percent number is pretty reliable.

The numbers are higher than Twitter itself, which, in announcing its 2016 annual results, stated that less than 5 percent of monthly active accounts are “false or used for spam purposes.” Although the figures from Twitter and the researchers differ, it must be stated that the researchers’ description of ‘bots’ also includes bona fide applications, such as the live Twittering of news feeds. Such accounts do not fall under the description that Twitter itself uses here.

In addition, however, Twitter also speaks of 8.5% of monthly active accounts that retrieve updates from Twitter feeds via third-party applications without any noticeable human interaction. That description fits the bots the researchers are looking at, but it’s still lower than the University’s lowest estimate.

Finally, the researchers also state that the maximum of their estimate, 15 percent, may still be too low. In the course of the investigation, it soon became clear that there are degrees of complexity among the Twitterbots. While simpler bots are limited to tracking certain users, there are also more ‘human-like’ bots that were more difficult to detect. The researchers therefore certainly do not rule out the possibility that there are bots that slip through the meshes of their model. They therefore emphasize the importance of detecting these bots, as deception and detection in this area is an ‘endless arms race’. They further reinforce the importance of this case by emphasizing that bots are now being used for spreading propaganda, rumours, conspiracy theories, manipulating the stock market and more.