The Pew Research Center just completed a study of 1.2 million tweeted links to answer a question: How many of those tweets were from another living human and how many were shared by bots?
And it appears, from their study, that about two out of three links shared are from automated and bot based accounts. Talk about influence!
Says Stefan Wojcik, a computational social scientist at the Center:
"Machine learning can be a valuable tool for research. It can be especially helpful when examining large amounts of social media data or other digital trace data on the web. In fact, in recent years, Pew Research Center has expanded its research using machine learning.
We also know that machine learning is a growing field and that there is always a degree of uncertainty in how well particular approaches work. We feel that the best way to use this tool is to be transparent in the decisions we make, be open about the possibility for error and be careful when interpreting our findings. We’re eager to contribute to the advances being made in natural language processing, applied statistics and machine learning, and we look forward to exploring their advantages and limitations."
You can see the Twitter bot research study results or the Q&A with the scientist who lead the study here.