The latest crop of social media influencers are bots.
Bots are responsible for two-thirds of the links to popular websites shared on Twitter, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. Meaning automated machines — not humans — are generating and sharing a sizable bulk of Twitter’s content.
Researchers analyzed 1.2 million tweets that linked to 2,315 popular websites over 47 days during the summer of 2017. The websites were grouped into seven categories: news and current events, adult content, sports, celebrity, organizations or groups and commercial products or services. Overall, 66 percent of these links were shared by bots. Bots also shared an estimated 90 percent of all links to adult content sites and 76 percent of all links to sports sites.
“They share a significant portion of tweeted links to even the most prominent and mainstream publications and online outlets,” Aaron Smith, Pew’s associate director of research, said in a press release. “Since these accounts can impact the information people see on social media, it is important to have a sense their overall prevalence on social media.”
Bots are nothing new, but the extent to which they infiltrate our feeds is relatively unknown — an issue that’s become of more concern in the era of fake news. Twitter itself said that 1.4 million users engaged with Russian propaganda spread by bots during the 2016 election.
But plenty of bots are anything but nefarious. The Netflix Bot automatically tweets when new shows or movies are added and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s bot randomly tweets images from the museum. Other bots tweet about grammar mistakes, game updates, or send alerts and updates during disasters like an earthquake or hurricane.
The Pew study stressed that they didn’t look at whether or not the bot tweets contained truthful information, or to what extent humans interacted with the content. Additionally, they stated that the bots didn’t exhibit any liberal or conservative bias in the links they shared.
“These findings illustrate the extent to which bots play a prominent and pervasive role in the social media environment,” said Smith. “Automated accounts are far from a niche phenomenon.”


