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Is Twitter’s Bot Problem an Advertising Problem?
What is this argument over Twitter bots really about?
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk continues to push the social media envelope with his ongoing struggles both for and against Twitter.
Is Elon Musk merely a muckraker- as Twitter board executives in their legal filings insist- determined to wrong-foot the gentle social media giant, drive down stock prices, perhaps even just for the hell of it?
Or is Musk starting an important, and long overdue, conversation about influence in online spaces like Twitter?
What’s really going on in Twitter’s public square? More importantly, just who exactly do we have in our new town square? How many bots are on Twitter?
The total number of bot accounts on Twitter, according to the Twitter board and its FEC filings, is less than 5%. Not everyone is buying this, however, and that includes plenty of Musk’s critics.
“And some researchers have said as many as half of the people on Twitter are bots,” admitted Samuel Wooley, author of Bots, in an interview with Slate back on June 13, 2022. “But I think that’s way overblown. More reasoned researchers would say it’s maybe 15 percent or 20 percent of the traffic on Twitter is bots. And we know that the majority of bots on Twitter are spam bots and are…