Top of the Bots: Twitter’s users not all they seem as 23 million revealed to be robots

The concept of Twitter bots is an amusing one. We’re imagining legions of automatons sitting behind their iMacs in a dark room, pressing the tweet button with mechanically superior bot fingers and spamming us with mega lolz.

 

But Twitter bots are a reality (albeit slightly different, it’s just a computer) and yesterday the social media platform admitted just how many there were – 23 million. 

 

That figure of non-human tweet-makers adds up to about 8.5 per cent of Twitter’s total users – a figure we imagine they’re not delighted to share, but which advertisers are now asking for. After all, bots don’t buy. 

 

The next question which follows is how many of our followers are actually real? A few years ago, an Italian professor called Marco Camisani Calzolari claimed up to 46 per cent of Twitter followers of companies were bots. 

 

https://twitter.com/marcocc/status/499245581047721984

 

“The number of followers is no longer a valid indicator of the popularity of a Twitter user, and can no longer be analyzed separately from qualitative information,” Calzolari said. Ouch. 

 

So we used an app called Status People and got some of the business world’s vital stats. Richard Branson has 24 per cent bots following him. Barclays Bank has 13 per cent. The City of London has 10 per cent and, drum-roll please, the chief exec of Twitter, Dick Costolo has 20 per cent. 

 

You’d think he’d be able to do something about that…