Rise of the machines: Bots on Twitter

Some recent experiments have thrown up some interesting results in regards to the use of bots on Twitter. Bots are not a new addition to social media. One only needs to remember the furore of the Trump election and the accusations over Russian bots promoting his campaign.

A bot is basically a program that can imitate a social media account. They might look like real people, but their behaviour is usually focused on promoting one coin constantly. This has been brought to light recently, when a few people did Twitter polls to test the amount of XRP bots within the space. In one, someone asked for people’s favourite kind of cheese. The choices were Reggiano, Cheddar, XRP, and Gruyere.

Unsurprisingly, the fake XRP cheese won the vote with a whopping 71% of the 889 votes cast. Now, we can not say for certain that this result is wholly due to bots. Indeed, the results may be skewed by many people on Twitter having a bit of fun. However, there is no doubt that bots are prevalent not just in this space, but in marketing in general.

If you are a PR company and don’t want to pay people to promote your product, you can create bots to get the word out there. Bots don’t need to be paid and don’t need to sleep. They are just programmed to regularly tweet out news and other nonsensical stuff.

Another clear example of bots is when your Twitter feed is full of random people sharing the same news article with precisely the same structure and text.

Bots aren’t the worst thing in the world, more just an annoyance. They are pretty obvious to spot. But when you see your favourite s**tcoin dumping a ton of news, just remember this doesn’t mean that there is a wide-ranging community. Rather, instead of having a solid base, they may be boosting their rookie numbers with the use of bots.