Do Bots impact Twitter activity?

Zafar Gilani, Reza Farahbakhsh, Jon Crowcroft

Abstract: The WWW has seen massive growth in population of automated programs (bots) for a variety of exploits on online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we extend on our previous work to study the affects of bots on Twitter. By setting up a bot account on Twitter and conducting analysis on a click logs dataset from our web server, we show that despite bots being in smaller numbers, they exercise a profound impact on content popularity and activity on Twitter.