About 48 Million Twitter Accounts Are Fake Robots, Not Real People - Study Reveals

A new study from USC and Indiana University claims that Twitter has roughly 48 million active bot accounts. That’s 15% of reported active users that are not human at all…

Earlier this year, a computer scientist in London has stumbled upon massive networks of fake Twitter accounts – with the largest consisting of over 350,000 profiles – which may have been used to ‘fake‘ numbers of followers, send spam, and boost interest in trending topics. On Twitter, bots are accounts that are run remotely by someone who automates the messages they send and activities they carry out.

As The BBC reported, UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.

But now, as CNBC reports, a much bigger big chunk of those “likes,” “retweets,” and “followers” lighting up your Twitter account may not be coming from human hands.

Researchers at USC used more than one thousand features to identify bot accounts on Twitter, in categories including friends, tweet content and sentiment, and time between tweets. Using that framework, researchers wrote that “our estimates suggest that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots.”