20% of active twitter users are fake
"Spam or Fake Twitter accounts are those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
Trending on Indie Hackers
I believe the official Twitter numbers, that it's closer to 5%. That's because Twitter has their own internal definition for what an "active" user is, and it likely includes lots of accounts who never tweet.
(@randfish acknowledges this in his excellent analysis, btw.)
If you assume there are 4-5x more lurkers on Twitter than there are tweeters, that 20% number becomes 4-5%, which makes sense to me. Indie Hackers has a similar ratio of active lurkers to active posters and commenters.
Thanks Courtland! It would be great to verify (through surveys, clickstream, etc), but that's certainly the interpretation that makes the numbers align -- bots/spam/fake tweet more, while many real users read/browse but don't engage in measurable ways.
I've seen it firsthand. I've got maybe a couple hundred followers, but most of them are sex bots that message me for bogus offers. Either way, I'm not surprised. It's probably pretty cheap to purchase thousands of fake accounts, and they probably follow multiple different accounts.
Still, the methodology for figuring out who is a bot seemed pretty sus to me.
Theres a massive market for creating real-looking comments and discussion. I'd wager that at least 50% of the conversations on the internet have been written by a person impersonating another person. One of my friends does it, actually. Somewhat lucrative field.
It's a matter of time before people realize they can't trust everything they see online. Its a lot of smoke and mirrors.
I wonder how many conversations are happening between bots. In other words, a bot posts a comment impersonating a human and another bot replies to that comment thinking it's a real human.
For all we know, I could be a bot replying to you, who is also a bot. As far as anyone else is concerned, this is a real conversation 😂
I've seen this a lot in the crypto space.
20% is a huge number !!
I least I know I'm real. If it's a bunch of bots that's following me, I kind of feel like a leader of some sort of machine army.
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It means that 80% are real humans personally composing the content of their tweets. More than I expected.
TikTok has this same issue
Twitter is a verry good platform to connect our social languages and people so we should try to reach them via twitter and avoid fake
Twitter is an echo chambers of people have one sided agenda running on retweets.
I'm currently developing a tool for benchmarking bot protection of various websites - if you feel like it, you should use it to test Twitter's bot protection and compare it to some other site!
It's currently free to use!
same, can I try it too?
Sure, here's the registration link - https://gui.botmenot.com/registration
Can I try it?
Of course, you can register here - https://gui.botmenot.com/registration