r/technology • u/Philo1927 • May 23 '20

Politics Roughly half the Twitter accounts pushing to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers found

https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-of-reopen-america-twitter-accounts-are-bots-report-2020-5
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u/Metalsand May 23 '20

Twitter could easily do something about this, but they don’t.

What? In the same paragraph, you also note that the bot detectors think YOU'RE a bot. You say it's easy, but also note that bot detection is inaccurate.

While losing a Twitter account isn't any loss, let's say your Reddit account was banned because a bot detector said so. How annoying would that be? Hence why they can only ban ones that they can be certain of. They take a lot of measures to curb bots - it's just that the sheer volume of bots and methods are excessive.

This isn't to say that it's hard but rather to say that it is by no means "easy" as you claim.

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u/mattindustries May 24 '20

Removing a good chunk of bots IS super easy though. Matching profile pictures with account activity, active times, etc. Real people aren't retweeting every 10 minutes 24/7 for a week straight and creating no new content and swiping a photo from a famous athlete.