Popular ‘celebrity’ Twitter accounts behave like bots: Study
‘Celebrity’ Twitter handles display bot-like behaviour, according to a study that found accounts with more than 10 million followers tend to retweet at a rate similar to automated systems. Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK found that in smaller accounts, bots tweet far more than humans. They noted that bot accounts differ from humans in several key ways. However, bot accounts generate more tweets than human accounts.
They also retweet far more often, and redirect users to external websites far more frequently than human users. The only exception to this was in accounts with more than 10 million followers, where bots and humans showed far more similarity in terms of the volume of tweets and retweets. Bots, like people, can be malicious or benign. The term ‘bot’ is often associated with spam, offensive content or political infiltration, but many of the most reputable organisations in the world also rely on bots for their social media channels.
For example, major news organisations rely on automation to share the news efficiently. The accounts, while classified as bots, are seen by users as trustworthy sources of information. “A Twitter user can be a human and still be a spammer, and an account can …read more
