We all know that Twitter is full of bots. Some make the app interesting and useful while other are just annoying.
We have never known how many bots are on Twitter till this report by the University Southern California and Indiana University. The report reveals that there are up to 48 million bots on Twitter out of 319 million Twitter accounts. This is a big number and is about 15% of all accounts on the platform.
48 million is almost double the number of bots Twitter reported back in 2014 back when the number of bots on the platform was between 5 to 8.5%. the thing about bots is that even though some may be useful, there are a number of individuals who may use them to push their own agendas. Case in point is during the US elections last year when it was reported that 19% of the election-related tweets came from bots.
This is scary considering the fact that most people these days go to Twitter to get the latest news and information. Such individuals may end up believing what they see on these accounts and may be misled with inaccurate information.
Twitter is yet to officially say anything about the bots on the platform and what it plans to do about them. We have seen the company launch initiatives that help it deal with harassment and bullying on the platform but not a concrete strategy to deal with the rise of bots. Let us hope we will get some clarification from the company very soon.
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