Confirming something that many of us already suspected, Twitter has revealed in its most recent SEC filing that almost 9% of all Twitter accounts aren’t used by actual humans. Given the social media’s 271 million accounts, that’s nearly 23 million Tweeters posting content at the behest of some form of automation or algorithm.
Confirming something that many of us already suspected, Twitter has revealed in its most recent SEC filing that almost 9% of all Twitter accounts aren’t used by actual humans. Given the social media’s 271 million accounts, that’s nearly 23 million Tweeters posting content at the behest of some form of automation or algorithm.
What this means for you:
Before you roll out the pitchforks and torches (or champagne and party hats!) it’s not clear what criteria Twitter is using to delineate between human and machine. Experienced tweeters utilize a number of automation tools that allow them to schedule tweets to be posted even when they aren’t at the keyboard, but the content (presumably) is 100% human-generated. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are bots on Twitter that post content completely autonomously, typically based upon algorithms and rulesets that process various data sources and reduce it to 160 characters of information. These bots can range from extremely useful (@LAQuakeBot) to banal (tweeting dog collars), but it points to a growing trend that not only is the internet increasingly being used by things, but that those things are producing content consumed by humans. Can you tell whether the tweets you are reading were written by a human? Hello, Skynet!
