Phil Howard INFORMATION · TECHNOLOGY · SOCIETY

Let’s Build Pro-Democracy Twitter Bots

Most Twitter users try to ignore messages from robot accounts. But maybe we should be putting bots to work for a more noble cause—democracy.

One estimate holds that 75 percent of all Twitter traffic is generated by the most active users—about 5 percent of Twitter accounts. One-third of those active users are believed to be machine bots tweeting more than 150 times a day. Because some bots generate fewer than 150 tweets a day, the actual number of bot-held accounts is probably higher. In fact, as many as one-quarter of all tweets made in an average day may come from bot accounts.

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