A latest study says that bots may be behind most of the links shared on Twitter and not human users.
A research by Pew Research Center states that almost seventy five percent of the tweeted links to one of the most popular digital platforms could be automated bots and not actual human users. The study was conducted for 1 million tweets in English language where users shared links to 2315 websites.
It was found out that these bots tweeted links of pornographic content and websites 90% of the times. The bots are also effective in sharing news content. Pew research shortlisted 500 suspected bot accounts and found out that they were responsible for 21% of the tweeted links to trending news and current affairs. In comparision to this activity the top 500 human users only contributed a pale 6% of the links of these new outlets. These tests were conducted over a period of six weeks.
“The results illustrate the pervasive role that automated tools play in disseminating links to a wide range of prominent accounts on Twitter,” the Pew researchers said.
But it seems bots are not limited to trolls, spammers and fake accounts. Many organizations such as The New York Times and Netflix also operate bot accounts. So it may not be a bad thing after all.
There have been reports which have suggested that bots can be used to populate social media with one sided biased content but Pew Researchers found no political links or bias with the links shared by these bots. It was split evenly between conservative and liberal content.
“Automated Twitter accounts actually share a higher proportion of links from sites that have ideologically mixed or centrist human audiences – at least within the realm of popular news and current events sites,” the report said.
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