As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people, says study
Web Publication: CNBC, by Michael Newburg
Shouting into the wind
This story by Michael Newburg adds another wrinkle after a hard week for confidence in Internet based social media. Earlier this week, we learned that the CIA has the ability to hear everything in real time on virtually every device – but we sorta already knew that. Now we really know it. Now, the CNBC article informs us that 15% of twitter accounts are ‘bots’ as in robots, as in machines and programs. The number may be high, may be low, so lets just go with 15%.
This reminds me of the several hook-up site scandals that not only compromised lots of famous folks, but also revealed that a many of the chicks they talked to were not even real to begin with. So talk about manipulation… I suspect this story will stay under the radar and only be taken seriously in the context of the stock price. I believe the vast majority of Twitter users are so self absorbed in their own feed that they don’t really give a damn, or maybe that’s just my stereotype of a Twitter user (disclaimer: I am not a Twitter user).
Since so few are likely to care, lets just take a moment to eulogize the ‘truth’. How do you even begin to characterize the billions or even trillions of words that machines are just making up? The bot tells you something like “I think Beyoncé is going to split from her man”. Ten words, ten lies. Sure no one really cares. The human tribe is quickly becoming unglued from reality. The avant-gardeist among us would tell us the machines are just as real as human. But really, those humans are more machine. That is not my tribe.
