A Twitter bot is a type of software bot that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. [1] The social bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, retweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts.[ citation needed ] The automation of Twitter accounts is governed by a set of automation rules that outline proper and improper uses of automation. [2] Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to users via direct message. [3] [4] [5] Improper usage includes circumventing API rate limits, violating user privacy, spamming, [6] and sockpuppeting. Twitter bots may be part of a larger botnet. They can be used to influence elections and in misinformation campaigns.
Twitter's policies do allow non-abusive bots, such as those created as a benign hobby or for artistic purposes, [7] or posting helpful information, [8] although price changes introduced to the previously free API service in June 2023 resulted in many such accounts closing. [9]
Many non-malicious bots are popular for their entertainment value. However, as technology and the creativity of bot-makers improves, so does the potential for Twitter bots that fill social needs. [10] [11] @tinycarebot is a Twitter bot that encourages followers to practice self care, and brands are increasingly using automated Twitter bots to engage with customers in interactive ways. [12] [13] One anti-bullying organization has created @TheNiceBot, which attempts to combat the prevalence of mean tweets by automatically tweeting kind messages. [14]
In June 2023, Twitter began charging $100 per month for basic access to its API, resulting in many entertainment bots being suspended or taken down. [9]
Concerns about political Twitter bots include the promulgation of malicious content, increased polarization, and the spreading of fake news. [15] [16] [17] A subset of Twitter bots programmed to complete social tasks played an important role in the United States 2016 Presidential Election. [18] Researchers estimated that pro-Trump bots generated four tweets for every pro-Clinton automated account and out-tweeted pro-Clinton bots 7:1 on relevant hashtags during the final debate. Deceiving Twitter bots fooled candidates and campaign staffers into retweeting misappropriated quotes and accounts affiliated with incendiary ideals. [19] [20] [21] Twitter bots have also been documented to influence online politics in Venezuela. [22] In 2019, 20% of the global Twitter trends were found to be created automatically using bots originating from Turkey. It is reported that 108,000 bot accounts were bulk tweeting to push 19,000 keywords to top trends in Turkey, to promote slogans such as political campaigns related to the 2019 Turkish local elections. [23]
In November 2022, Chinese bots coordinately flooded Twitter with garbage information (e.g. online gambling ads) so as to distract the users' attention away from the protests. [24] These bots, disguised as attractive girls, hashtagged the major cities in China. [25]
The majority of Twitter accounts following public figures and brands are often fake or inactive, making the number of Twitter followers a celebrity has a difficult metric for gauging popularity. [26] While this cannot always be helped, some public figures who have gained or lost huge quantities of followers in short periods of time have been accused of discreetly paying for Twitter followers. [27] [28] For example, the Twitter accounts of Sean Combs, Rep Jared Polis (D-Colo), PepsiCo, Mercedes-Benz, and 50 Cent have come under scrutiny for possibly engaging in the buying and selling of Twitter followers, which is estimated to be between a $40 million and $360 million business annually. [27] [28] Account sellers may charge a premium for more realistic accounts that have Twitter profile pictures and bios and retweet the accounts they follow. [28] In addition to an ego boost, public figures may gain more lucrative endorsement contracts from inflated Twitter metrics. [27] For brands, however, the translation of online buzz and social media followers into sales has recently come under question after The Coca-Cola Company disclosed that a corporate study revealed that social media buzz does not create a spike in short term sales. [29] [30]
It is sometimes desirable to identify when a Twitter account is controlled by an internet bot. [31] Following a test period, Twitter rolled out labels to identify bot accounts and automated tweets in February 2022. [32] [33]
Detecting non-human Twitter users has been of interest to academics. [31] [34]
In a 2012 paper, Chu et al. propose the following criteria that indicate that an account may be a bot (they were designing an automated system): [1]
Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California used artificial intelligence to identify Twitter bots. He found that humans reply to other tweets four or five times more than bots and that bots continue to post longer tweets over time. [35] Bots also post at more regular time gaps, for example, tweeting at 30-minute or 60-minute intervals. [35]
Indiana University has developed a free service called Botometer [36] (formerly BotOrNot), which scores Twitter handles based on their likelihood of being a Twitterbot. [37] [38] [39]
Recent research from EPFL argued that classifying a Twitter account as bot or not may not be always possible because hackers take over human accounts and use them as bots temporarily or permanently [40] and in parallel to the owner of the account in some cases. [23]
There are many different types of Twitter bots and their purposes vary from one to another. Some examples include:
In 2009, based on a study by Sysomos, Twitter bots were estimated to create approximately 24% of tweets on Twitter. [60] According to the company, there were 20 million, fewer than 5%, of accounts on Twitter that were fraudulent in 2013. [61] In 2013, two Italian researchers calculated 10 percent of total accounts on Twitter were "bots" although other estimates have placed the figure even higher. [62] One significant academic study in 2017 estimated that up to 15% of Twitter users were automated bot accounts. [63] [64] A 2020 estimate puts the figure at 15% of all accounts or around 48 million accounts. [65]
A 2023 MIT study found that third-party tools used to detect bots may not be as accurate as they are trained on data being collected in simplistic ways, and each tweet in these training sets then manually labeled by people as a bot or a human. [66] Already in 2019 German researchers scrutinized studies that were using Botswatch and Botometer, dismissing them as fundamentally flawed and concluded that (unlike spam accounts) there is no evidence that "social bots" even exist. [67]
The prevalence of Twitter bots coupled with the ability of some bots to give seemingly human responses has enabled these non-human accounts to garner widespread influence. [68] [69] [20] [70] The social implications these Twitter bots potentially have on human perception are sizeable. Looking at the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, the journal notes, "people exhibit remarkable social reactions to computers and other media, treating them as if they were real people or real places." The study concluded that Twitter bots were viewed as credible and competent in communication and interaction making them suitable for transmitting information in the social media sphere. [71] Whether posts are perceived to be generated by humans or bots depends on partisanship, a 2023 study found. [72]
Astroturfing is the deceptive practice of hiding the sponsors of an orchestrated message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, unsolicited grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial backers.
An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.
Twitter, officially known as X since July 2023, is a social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media websites and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as "tweets" or "retweets" and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
A click farm is a form of click fraud where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on links or buttons for the click fraudster. The workers click the links, surf the target website for a period of time, and possibly sign up for newsletters prior to clicking another link. For many of these workers, clicking on enough ads per day may increase their revenue substantially and may also be an alternative to other types of work. It is extremely difficult for an automated filter to detect this simulated traffic as fake because the visitor behavior appears exactly the same as that of an actual legitimate visitor.
Since the launch of Twitter on July 15, 2006, there have been many notable uses for the service in a variety of environments, including political, economic, social and cultural uses. As users tweet their messages on Twitter, they encourage other people to respond and engage in online discussions as well as offline activities. User engagement on Twitter is usually measured with likes, replies and retweets and is a form of social power.
Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
Social spam is unwanted spam content appearing on social networking services, social bookmarking sites, and any website with user-generated content. It can be manifested in many ways, including bulk messages, profanity, insults, hate speech, malicious links, fraudulent reviews, fake friends, and personally identifiable information.
The term X bomb or post bomb refers to posting numerous posts with the same hashtags and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of advertising a certain meme, usually by filling people's post feeds with the same message, and making it a "trending topic" on X. This may be done by individual users, fake accounts, or both.
Horse_ebooks is a Twitter account and Internet phenomenon. Registered in 2010, the account was apparently intended to promote e-books but became known for its amusing non sequiturs in what seemed to be an effort to evade spam detection.
Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian academic. He is a University Distinguished Professor and the Luddy Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University. Menczer is the Director of the Observatory on Social Media, a research center where data scientists and journalists study the role of media and technology in society and build tools to analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media. Menczer holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics, is a founding member and advisory council member of the IU Network Science Institute, a former director the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, a senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute, a fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, and a former fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. In 2020 he was named a Fellow of the ACM.
Ghost followers, also referred to as ghosts and ghost accounts or lurkers, are users on social media platforms who remain inactive or do not engage in activity. They register on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. These users follow active members, but do not partake in liking, commenting, messaging, and posting. These accounts may be created by people or by social bots.
CongressEdits (@congressedits) is a social media bot account created on July 8, 2014 that posts changes to Wikipedia articles that originate from IP addresses within the ranges assigned to the United States Congress. The changes could be made by anyone using a computer on the U.S. Capitol complex's computer network, including both staff of U.S. elected representatives and senators as well as visitors such as journalists, constituents, tourists, and lobbyists. CongressEdits has been called a watchdog by NBC News.
Peñabots is the nickname for automated social media accounts allegedly used by the Mexican government of Enrique Peña Nieto and the PRI political party to keep unfavorable news from reaching the Mexican public. Peñabot accusations are related to the broader issue of fake news in the 21st century.
Tay was a chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation as a Twitter bot on March 23, 2016. It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter. It was replaced with Zo.
A social bot, also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid) via algorithm. Social bots can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to express messages in more natural human dialogue.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump had stated he would not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account remained inactive until he tweeted again in August 2024.
Jack Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and former United States Navy intelligence officer.
X, formerly Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and X's use of suspensions has been controversial.
Emilio Ferrara is an Italian-American computer scientist, researcher, and professor in the field of data science and social networks. As of 2022, he serves as a Full Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), in the Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Annenberg School for Communication, where he conducts research on computational social science, network science, and machine learning. Ferrara is known for his work in the detection of social bots and the analysis of misinformation on social media platforms.