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

Re:How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer... by pixxel on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:04AM (#31501109)

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.

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Re:How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer... by serial_dev on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:06AM (#31501781)

Twitter (used to?) recommend accounts to follow (I remember Obama, Shakira, WaPo, and I'm sure NYT) when you sign up with a new account, and those accounts probably have highly inflated number of followers with extremely low engagement (new users don't always stock around).

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Re:How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer... by ProfXponent on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @05:24AM (#31502207)

Recently created an alt account and they still do this.

It was mostly “influencers”.

One thing I have noticed is that Twitter REALLY wants me to follow Elon Musk. He’s at the top of pretty much every recommendation I’ve seen on the site.

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Re:How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer... by blitzar on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:56AM (#31502036)

Who comments or retweets news headlines? There is nobody on the other side of the account who is going to engage with you - the accounts are literally bots that publish the headlines from their feed.

Lots of people follow the news / latest most followed celebrity account and dont engage with that person at all.

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Re:How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer... by throwaway0x7E6 on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @05:23AM (#31502204)

apparently that's "normal" for New York Times in particular

check out the views to comments ratio on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4II9cYrQvE

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