Re:Twitter Is Crawling with Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expe...
by dmix on Friday October 13, 2017 @02:19PM
(#15468068)
> Twitter has 300 milliom active users per month, 9-15% of them bots, the US election had 120 million voters
Fair enough. So if 10% of voters used Twitter, that means 3% (400k) were bots, and of those a tiny percent were fringe/far-right.
Re:Twitter Is Crawling with Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expe...
by boomboomsubban on Friday October 13, 2017 @04:11PM
(#15468881)
>tiny percent were fringe/far-right.
Nothing posted is proof of that. The 1600 number is interesting as it means one entity was trying to influence elections in three countries. It is not the number that were far-right, that number was not in this article.
As context is supposed to be a needed thing, you could have just found the research paper rather than perform guestimates math. Fifteen percent of users tweeting about the election were bots, twenty percent of tweets, and about three Trump bots for every Hilary bot.
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7090/56...
Read it again. Of those 400k bots, 1600 were identified talking about the US elections, anti-Macron sentiment, and extremist far-right topics. All three topics. That could be one person/group reusing bots.
Additionally, hundreds of millions of real users talking politics is unlikely. Twitter has 300 milliom active users per month, 9-15% of them bots, the US election had 120 million voters. Hundreds of millions would be nearly everyone.