Fake stuff is all over the internet. It’s full of junk, and hence it is a risky place to share your private information. According to a recent study, around 48 million twitter accounts are bots. A Twitterbot is a bot program used to produce automated posts on the Twitter microblogging service or to automatically follow Twitter users. Not only this, but around 9 to 15 percent of tweets come from accounts that are fake.
Basically, if someone recently followed you, or liked your tweet, and if it was someone that you do not know, then for all you know, in fact in a probable case, it might be a BOT or even a fake account. In the 319 million active users that twitter has monthly, 28.7 to 47.9 million are bots, basically around 9 to 15 percent.
Twitter officials, however, deny this figure, and state that there are many bot accounts on twitter, but not as many as these studies suggest. According to twitter, there are just around 27 million bot accounts. The university has also actually stated that the 15 percent figure they said might be a rather ‘conservative figure’ because there might be more complex bots, which might have been wrongly identified as humans.
The surprising thing about the bot accounts is that this is not the first time that twitter has come under fire relating to that bot accounts. A study conducted last year found out that around 19 percent of the election-related tweets during the time of the study came from bot accounts. Whether twitter will do something to minimise the bot accounts, we can only wait and see.
