How many of Twitter's userbase are bots? - Why do so many stupid posts seem to get thousands of likes?

[InsolentGaylord]

This is a thought that's been occurring to me often. Lately on twitter, you will get these usually left wing posts that complain about how misogynist/sexist/racist something is, and they'll somehow, despite this user being like less than 1k followers, and the tweet in question only having a few thousand or less retweets, somehow get over 100k likes in a matter of hours. The reason I am starting to have some doubt that many of these likes are legit, is due to the follower count of the user in question usually being quite now, the retweet count being quite low, and also the fact many of these tweets are very low quality, almost borderline like a child saying something dumb in a DM conversation.

Is it possible these users are buying likes which is why so many of these dumb tweets get so many likes out of nowhere? It's bizarre that this keeps happening in recent years and maybe I am just in denial, but I have this feeling these tweets are astroturfed or the user is buying likes in hopes of getting followers.

 

[Dr. Henry Armitage]

Personally I'm of the opinion most of the internet is made up of bots at this point. Just bots talking to each other to push whatever propaganda the powers that be want pushed at the moment.

 

[Corpun]

Probably a quarter or a fourth or around 25% or more less around that figure, giving or taking some. The real question is how many Redditors are bots.

 

[Shig O'nella]

In 2017 it was estimated to be around 15% of all twitter accounts were bots. Can't find anything more recent.

15% doesn't sound like a huge number, but they never sleep, they respond instantly and they can do thousands of likes etc per minute. So in terms of their effect they were equivalent to the other 85% combined.

Edit: adding 5 years, several dozen crisis, and the increasing stridancy of various spergs, I'd say @Corpun has it right. Maybe a bit on the low side.

 

[ChefKiss]

Probably a quarter or a fourth or around 25% or more less around that figure, giving or taking some. The real question is how many Redditors are bots.

Less bots on reddit than on twitter, more actual paid shills, of course there are tons of paid shills on twitter too but it isnt as easy to game, 100k bots retweeting bots to other bots isnt as effective as 10k bots upvoting an actual written post on reddit

 

[InsolentGaylord]

How come many of these bots seem so...life-like with their bios? Is it like an AI generated thing, like with all the pronoun and labelling and activist causes in the bios?

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

I'm sure it's a major factor. I mean, we can be certain that the Deep State does inorganic boosting of things that support The Narrative(tm), or distract from something they don't want known, or make their enemies look bad. But there are also a ton of TDS complete spastics out there who are absolutely pathetic enough to actually buy followers and likes. I'm sure a lot of them have seen that guy who ended up literally getting hired to do nothing but anti-Trump tweets and think that if they get enough likes and retweets that they can get a job like that too.

 

[Corpun]

Less bots on reddit than on twitter, more actual paid shills, of course there are tons of paid shills on twitter too but it isnt as easy to game, 100k bots retweeting bots to other bots isnt as effective as 10k bots upvoting an actual written post on reddit

You really think all those people on r/politics are paid shills and not bots run by people doing gayops?

 

[Toolbox]

Probably a quarter or a fourth or around 25% or more less around that figure, giving or taking some. The real question is how many Redditors are bots.

Reddit might actually have a higher proportion in some areas, especially anything involving politics, but I can't discount that a lot of them might just be paid shills reciting the same rhetoric over and over. I know I have met shills for specific corporations or were there to promote specific parts of an industry that people find unsavory. Ever since the founding of shareblue/correct the record and other similar organizations around 2016, Reddit shifted incredibly fast from bearable to apocalyptic levels of shit flinging.

 

[Nigger Respecter]

They're not bots, they're just NPCs. And Twitter's algorithm makes it so you see posts you would likely enjoy, and if you're just some generic person huffing the farts of generic lukewarm leftism, you'll see those tweets pop up in your feed. There's a reason there's so many of those blue checkmarks saying this shit, because it hits the algorithm and gets numbers which allows them to sell their book or patreon or whatever

 

[Hee]

Buying/using bots have been an admitted thing in IG and Facebook influencer circles. A lot of influencers pay their way into verified circles to boost visibility, so it isn't far-fetched to think that bot farms are being used. Something as simple as like farms on twitter would be expected.

However, I do agree a bit with Nigger Respecter. It takes nothing for the NPC-like people to like a post as soon as any self-affirming buzzword registers in their head, so some of it is definitely genuine. Remember: Twitter is the most left-leaning of big time social media platforms.

Until someone scrapes the behavior of like 300 million accounts and parses it out where we can observe viral posts, which is something unlikely to occur, we unfortunately won't know for sure the percentage in cases like this.

 

[stupid orc]

Less bots on reddit than on twitter, more actual paid shills, of course there are tons of paid shills on twitter too but it isnt as easy to game, 100k bots retweeting bots to other bots isnt as effective as 10k bots upvoting an actual written post on reddit

where do i get these “paid shills” jobs i’d love to apply

 

[ChefKiss]

where do i get these “paid shills” jobs i’d love to apply

Correct the record, shareblue, chinese communist party, tons of big companies. Or you can join any "Reputation management" firm if you want a job writing reddit posts and there are LOTS of them. Or specifically look for "Crisis communications" if you really want to just got for the maximum level of lying to people's faces

 

[Pissmaster]

Something I've noticed on Reddit threads is that, even on non-political subs, there's an occasional left-wing sperg that always gets a good number of upvotes, and anyone that tries to counter him always gets a roughly equal amount of downvotes, and if they have a back-and-forth, this same cycle happens, as if a handful of very dedicated people are watching the thread and siding with the sperg no matter what he says. That's clearly bot work.

As far as Twitter goes, it's gotta be more like 80% bots and paid shills. The only people I've ever known in real life that actively used Twitter were terminally online lefties, niggas trying to promote they hip hop, and one boomer that used it to politisperg into the void. Most people don't ever touch it.