How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer and misses the point

marban | 30 points

The Botometer guys need to give this up. They've been doing this for years yet their models lack credibility, having been subject in the past to 50%+ false positive rates which were never acknowledged. Instead they silently hard-coded their websites to fix the particular examples being used to prove FPs (their methodologies are never replicable, so a black box API is all you get).

When you sit down and read these papers you find the whole field of academic bot research is just ideologically motivated quackery. It isn't taken seriously by anyone who actually works in the spam fighting industry, but does harm the overall credibility of science. If these people actually want to work on bot fighting (like I did) they need to quit academia and go apply for jobs at tech firms. Anything they try produce externally will be noise, because as they acknowledge:

"External researchers do not have access to the same data as Twitter, such as IP addresses and phone numbers. This hinders the public’s ability to identify inauthentic accounts."

It doesn't hinder it, the lack of such basic signals makes it impossible, which is one of several reasons their studies keep yielding junk-quality results.

Further reading:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...

mike_hearn | 2 years ago

Very useless article. "It's hard to count them, so let's just acknowledge the difficulty of the problem instead of solving it."

Decker87 | 2 years ago

Yeah clickbait. The issue with bots comes down to the valuation of twitter end of story. Musk wants to bring that valuation down and he's using bots as a method to do that.

To be honest he does have a point (I hate this) as I could easily create and app with 500 bot users and 50 real users. Selling it for if I had 550 is really scummy.

Dave3of5 | 2 years ago

It would be useful, in so many ways, when there would be a way to prove that you are a unique human being without revealing too much of your identity. An intermediary NGO could provide that, if they in turn integrate with national identity registrations (many countries have these for tax, healthcare and social security registrations. As a policy, it should only provide proof of existence, nationality and “over 18” as data points.

It can help to solve problems with bots, account theft, as well as accountability for hate speech/intimidation (the system should allow law enforcement to reveal identities over which they have jurisdiction).

superjan | 2 years ago

Isn't the number of bots primarily relevant to advertisers? This article entirely misses why the question is even worth asking.

aufhebung | 2 years ago

Nieman misses the mark here. They are worried about some other fight - "authentic" vs "inauthentic". That's fine but not the issue at question.

vorpalhex | 2 years ago

I picked a random news org. and scrolled through their feed. It was The New York Times with 53 million followers. Scroll through their last 100 tweets or so and look at the engagement. 5-50 comments, 20-200 retweets. I used to get that level of engagement back in the day when I used Twitter with a couple thousand followers. Something’s off.

Note. I’m not American and have no political affiliation to have selected NYT.

EDIT: this was before the shooting that's just happened.

pixxel | 2 years ago

"...it is important to be clear here that Musk is lying. The spam bots are not why he is backing away from the deal, as you can tell from the fact that the spam bots are why he did the deal. He has produced no evidence at all that Twitter’s estimates are wrong, and certainly not that they are materially wrong or made in bad faith. (Musk can only get out of the deal if Twitter's filings are wrong in a way that would cause a 'material adverse effect' on Twitter, which is vanishingly unlikely.) His own supposed methodology for counting spam bots is laughable. Yesterday Twitter’s chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal, tweeted a thread explaining in general terms how Twitter estimates that fake accounts represent fewer than 5% of its count of active users, and how this analysis can’t be easily replicated by outsiders (because they don’t know which accounts are real, and also because they don’t know which accounts Twitter counts as daily active users). It seems clear that Agrawal’s thoughtful answer is basically correct. Musk responded with a poop emoji.

More important, nothing has changed about the bot problem since Musk signed the merger agreement. Twitter has published the same qualified estimate — that fewer than 5% of monetizable accounts are fake — for the last eight years. Musk knew those estimates, and declined to do any nonpublic due diligence before signing the merger agreement. He knew about the spam bot problem before signing the merger agreement, as we know because he talked about it constantly, including while announcing the merger agreement. If he didn’t want to buy Twitter because there are spam bots, he should not have signed a contract to buy Twitter. No new information has come to light about spam bots in the last three weeks.

What has happened in the last three weeks? Well, the prices of tech stocks have gone down, making the $54.20 price that Musk agreed to look a bit rich. (Snap Inc., a social-media competitor to Twitter, is down more than 30% since Musk made his offer on April 13.) And the price of Tesla Inc. stock, which he is relying on to finance part of the purchase price, has also gone down, making him poorer and making the $54.20 price look even more expensive. (Tesla is down almost 30% since he made his offer.) So he is angling to reprice the deal for straightforward market reasons. But that is very clearly not allowed by the merger agreement that he signed: Public-company merger agreements allocate broad market risk to the buyer, and he can’t get out just because stocks went down.

So he is pretending that he wants to reprice the deal for other reasons. He is not pretending very hard — the poop emoji is not going to hold up in court! — but he’s doing enough to confuse the public and give his fans a pretext to believe that he is really the victim here."

Twitter's Board are a clown car.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-17/elon-m...

JumpCrisscross | 2 years ago

So I forget: Are masses of Russian bots spewing disinformation still swaying public opinion on important issues? Or has there been acknowledgement that that never really happened?

h2odragon | 2 years ago

Are bots not entitled to free speech as well?

shapefrog | 2 years ago
aaron695 | 2 years ago

""" The focus of the recent debate on estimating the number of Twitter bots oversimplifies the issue and misses the point of quantifying the harm of online abuse and manipulation by inauthentic accounts. """ This article is missing the point. The reason Musk wants to know how many bots there are is because a lot of the advertising revenue isn't "pay per click" ads, but just companies advertising for more eyes to see it. In that case, companies aren't going to pay if it's not real human eyes seeing it

bit of clickbait

aronhegedus | 2 years ago

The point is: Twitter is useful for who?

For users I see nothing useful. For third party using users tweets to get live coverage of something a little use.

For human network and mud analysis by Twitter owners and those who buy/commission such studies a significant use.

So the point is: WHY THE HELL so many people want to work for free mostly against their own interests spending time on the platform? That's an interesting point because having flock of humans (sorry for being so rude, but that's is) willing to work for free for someone else interests is VERY interesting... I have many things I'd like to outsource for free to third parties willing to work gratis for me. Just basic stuff eh! Who want to came at my home to clean it up regularly for free or even pay for being allowed to clean up more regularly?

kkfx | 2 years ago