I don't think this post means as much as people are acting like it does.
The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality.
Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.
This is a terrible metric. Real people use the location field for all sorts of non-location purposes, as well as more freeform descriptions of their location that wouldn't resolve mechanically.
Just out of interest, imagine you were in a hot desert. There is a tortoise in front of you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without for your help. But you're not helping. Why?
My main account literally has “fake account” in the description as sort of a joke, because I really use Twitter exclusively for browsing, and maybe liking/RT’ing stuff.
But hey maybe with these kind of analysis, and rando computer generated / un-appealable bans in the the future the "real accounts" will just mean "very elaborate bot".
Mine as well. I deliberately have not set a profile image, and have not attracted many followers. I probably should not bother with Twitter but I am around and am a real human.
The indicators of being a spambot they have in their post seem VERY iffy to me. "Not tweeting in the past 120 days", "Location set to a non resolving location", "Small number of followers", "default profile image", "No URL in bio or non-resolving URL in bio", "Not on many lists", "tweets in a different language than the person they're following" - Those all seem like extremely weak signals to me. My profile matches 6 of those, and I'm a human. I would like to see them hand-verify a subset of their results and see if their algorithm matches reality.
Also note that they define "active" differently than Twitter. They define "active" as having tweeted recently. Twitter gives spambot numbers as a percent of monetizable daily active users. I wonder if Twitter's given bot numbers are low because bots don't typically lurk or load ads. I can believe that the total bot count as a percentage of users or as a percentage of recently-tweeting-users is higher than 5%, but that only 5% of daily visitors seeing ads are bots.