Twitter bots, trolls, fakes, parodies, and anonymous

Twitter indeed has numerous bots. But not every weird account that you encounter on Twitter is a bot. There is a clear difference among the bots, trolls, and fakes, though often the demarcation is vague.

First, a bot is not necessarily bad, though often bots are deployed with malicious intent, such as distributing propaganda and making viral content out of useless posts. Twitter bots are an economic model, with companies such as Devumi selling them to like, retweet, comment, and share your posts automatically for a price. 

 

I had two bots Llovizna and @on_my_way_home to tweet every time I post something to my blog. I stopped these accounts and their posts in 2016. I could have made these automated posts directly to my main Twitter account Pradeeban. In 2009, I chose to create proxy accounts to tweet my blog posts to keep my Twitter account under my entire control, with no automation.

People often confuse a bot with a fake account and an anonymous account. An anonymous account is usually genuine. It hides the real identity of the user but does not try to create an alter-ego or another personality for the human behind the user. An anonymous account may have 0 to 100% of identification information of the user. On the other hand, a fake account is intended to misrepresent someone. If I create an account with no information at all to post on sensitive topics, that is an anonymous account. On the other hand, if I pretend to be a princess from Sweden in my Twitter profile, that is a fake account. 

Some fake accounts acknowledge they are fake, and often function with a touch of humor, faking the identity of a known person, such as politicians, leaders, and actors. They are parodies, as long as they acknowledge this in their profile, so as not to mislead an unsuspecting follower.

A bot account is still a complete account. By logging into the account, a human still can post tweets as in a regular account. However, usually interacting with a bot account is fruitless.

Trolls can be a regular account, though more often than not they are fakes, parodies, or anonymous accounts, as the repercussions of being a troll are imminent in the current sensitive world. It is often advised not to involve the trolls, as the more you interact with someone over the Twitter in their timeline, more visibility they get.

I have seen arguments on Twitter, where a verified user or a user with several followers discrediting the other party by their number of followers. "She got only 50 followers. She must be a bot" or "He got only 30 followers. He must be fake". These arguments are flawed for several reasons. First, if someone is making an intelligent communication, it is (still) not possible to be a bot. Second, you cannot judge a person fake by their number of followers. The person can just be someone who is busy with their real life than harvesting Twitter followers in a shady practice followed by many popular and verified accounts (more on this in my previous post, Twitter is inherently flawed and unfair - and "Influencers" are ruining it).

I also noticed that those who use the "number of followers" as a measure to judge the validity of someone's tweets are the ones that pay for fake/bot followers, or use the shady practice of "follow and unfollow after a follow back" used by accounts such as @cammipham and @IAmJeffEmmerson. 

Twitter bots are not necessarily bad. They do some specific useful tasks, such as creating news syndicates and reporting weather alerts. Therefore, disabling the potential for bots is not a good idea. However, it may be a good middle ground if Twitter makes it mandatory for the bot creators to explicitly identify and acknowledge them as bots and offer to identify information to the creator. Such restrictions are already in place for parody accounts - you must self-identify your account as a parody if you are impersonating someone (usually a famous person). Otherwise, your account may be terminated by Twitter. We need similar measures to bots to ensure ethical use of bots.

Fake accounts can be entirely fictitious or imitate a real living person to some degree such as using someone else's identity or photo. Fake accounts are often harmful and are malicious in intent (for example, consider someone faking as a minor/child, or someone faking as a racial or sexual minority to make a political statement). They need to be controlled too. Twitter needs to improve a lot. Their workflow is flawed. Their verification program is broken and harmful. I still appreciate the simplicity of Twitter, despite its shortcomings. It is always an excellent platform to share your thoughts publicly, even if no one is listening.