Pew: Most Links on Twitter Come From Bots...
MOST LINKS TO POPULAR SITES ON TWITTER COME FROM BOTS
A new study from Pew Research shows that the bulk of
links on Twitter don't come from actual humans.
04.09.1810:00 AM
BOTS HAVE BECOME a great scourge of the internet.
Recently, they've flooded government comment systems with fake activism, distorted
the national discourse on guns, and launched malicious attacks against the
Justice Department. And a new study suggests they're behind the majority of
links shared on Twitter, too.
A Pew Research report released Monday finds that a whole
two-thirds of links to popular sites shared on Twitter come from automated
accounts. But these aren't just those malicious Russian bots posing as the
uncannily angry and active boy next door. They also include legitimate accounts
belonging to organizations that schedule tweets through some kind of automated
service. What's more, the study finds, the majority of these accounts are not
as politically polarized as headlines might make them out to be, nor do they
primarily link to hyper-partisan websites. In fact, some of the websites
receiving the largest share of links from bots are mainstream business outlets.
Oh, and porn.
"Material being posted by bots or automated accounts
is not just the province of niche publications," says Aaron Smith,
associate director of research at Pew. "It's much broader and more
pervasive within the ecosystem as a whole."
To conduct the study, Pew researchers analyzed a random
sample of 1.2 million tweets sent between July 27 and September 11, 2017, which
it scraped from Twitter's public API. The researchers then analyzed the top
3,000 websites those tweets linked to during that period, and divided them into
six categories: adult content, sports, celebrity, commercial products or
services, organizations or groups, and news and current events. Some of those
links had since gone dead, winnowing the total pool of websites to 2,315.
Finally, the researchers ran all of the Twitter accounts that were linking to
each of those websites through a tool called the Botometer to determine what
percentage of those links came from automated accounts.
'Material being posted by bots or automated accounts is
not just the province of niche publications.'
AARON SMITH, PEW RESEARCH
Developed by researchers at the Indiana University
Network Science Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems
Research, the Botometer is a machine learning tool that analyzes 1,200 signals
of any given account—including the profile and the timing of tweets—to predict
whether a given account is automated. The Botometer's developers note that
"organizational accounts," like say @BarackObama, are classified as
automated. The Botometer does, however, give researchers the ability to tinker
with its thresholds and decide how broad an estimate they want.
Twitter takes issue with third-party tools, including
Botometer, which a company spokesperson says are often flawed, because they only
have access to Twitter's public API. Many of the signals Twitter uses to
determine whether a given account is a bot are private, and not shared through
the API.
Smith agrees that not all of Botometer's assessments can
be taken as truth, but in aggregate, he says, they paint a largely accurate
picture. In this case, the Pew researchers started with a small sample set of
accounts that their human data scientists assessed to be bots, and ran them
through the Botometer to see what score it would give them. It used that score
as the minimum threshold for what would be considered a bot as part of this
report. Still, Smith acknowledges, "It is an estimate with some inherent
uncertainty and a level of both false positives and false negatives."
Using this methodology, the researchers found that 66
percent of all tweets linking to the most popular websites during that time
period were automated. For sites featuring adult content, an eye-popping 90
percent of links were tweeted by automated accounts. But the most surprising
finding for Smith was the fact that partisan political sites weren't
particularly prone to links from bots. These accounts shared just 41 percent of
links to sites shared primarily by conservatives, and 44 percent of links to
political sites shared primarily by liberals. By comparison, bots shared 57
percent to 66 percent of links to news sites shared primarily by ideologically
mixed audiences.
The Pew researchers found that business sites were
particularly popular with bots because so many automated accounts exist for the
purpose of sharing news that includes stock tickers. That, Smith says, may
explain why, for example, more than 75 percent of links to Forbes during that
time came from bots. That's a far higher percentage of bot links than either
liberal sites like Mother Jones or conservative sites like Fox News received.
"It certainly runs a little bit counter to some of
the narratives about bots right now," Smith says.
The researchers stopped short of distinguishing between
good bots and bad ones, or between accounts that intentionally misrepresent
themselves and accounts like, say, @netflix_bot, which automatically tweets
when new content has been added to the online streaming service. As a result,
it remains unclear what percentage of Twitter bots perform a useful service and
what percent are problematic.
Twitter is at least aware of its bot problem, though CEO
Jack Dorsey has admitted the company was too slow in responding to it. "We
have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and
human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo
chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or
our inability to address it fast enough," Dorsey tweeted in March. The
company did recently announce new restrictions, preventing third-party apps
from allowing people to tweet from multiple accounts at once or perform actions
like retweeting, liking, or sharing hashtags in bulk.
These new policies, which went into effect last month,
may well alter the Twitter landscape Pew researchers observed in the fall. As
Twitter and its users continue to rethink the value of automated accounts,
Smith says, "We’re hopeful this will provide some additional context for
those conversations that are happening and make it more apparent that this is
not something that just happens in the context of problematic news or niche
sites. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing."
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