Is This Account Fake?
What is a Twitter Bot? A Twitter Bot is a software program that automates your social media activity, such as retweeting and liking content, so that you bring in engagement.
In 2018, bot accounts made up 52% of all web traffic. Not all bots are bad, they can be positive and funny, but when they are bad they are something that you should be able to look out for. Bots have been used in political elections and have been used to sway people in certain directions.
These are twitter accounts that were found to be bots during the 2016 Presidential Election.
So, how do I detect that an account is a bot?
According to Chris Makara, there are easy ways you can spot a fake account.
They’re an egghead: literally their profile picture is an egg. Now, this doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a bot, but most people upload a profile picture.
Excessive duplicate tweets: if you notice that an account tweets or replies with the same text, you found a bot
Confusing screen name/URL combination: this is when the name on the profile does not match the username what so ever. A user name could be @ksldjfwnifaos and the name on the profile is Sarah Pickett.
No or low followers
You’re probably wondering how you can get rid of these bots from being on your feed and following your account. One way is that you can simply block them from your account. When blocking accounts, you won’t see their tweets on your feed and it forces the bot to unfollow your account. Here’s how you block an account. You simply go on their profile and click the three dots next to the bell button. You click the three dots, scroll down and hit block.
Up above is a link to a tool called Circleboom that’s used to strengthen a social media accounts social network and enables users, brands, and SMB’s (server message block) to grow. This app will tell you who to follow and who to unfollow, and you can remove inactive, silent, or overactive twitter accounts. This is a great tool to use to unfollow bots and to also grow your own social network!
This graph shows how the 500 most active bot accounts tweet a lot more than the 500 most-active human accounts. This analysis of 379,841 tweeted linked to 925 popular news and current events websites shows that 66% of those tweeted links were from bot accounts and 22% were from the 500 most-active accounts on twitter.
I hope this information will give you more knowledge on twitter bots and how to watch out for them. Remember, if Twitter Bots are annoying you or you don’t want them following you, you can always block the account and Twitter will most likely take the account down.
References:
https://botsociety.io/blog/2018/08/what-is-a-twitter-bot/
https://itstillworks.com/12759689/how-to-get-rid-of-twitter-bots
https://chrismakara.com/social-media/11-easy-ways-to-spot-a-fake-twitter-account/
https://blog.circleboom.com/4-surefire-ways-to-identify-fake-twitter-accounts/
https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/twitter-stats-and-statistics/