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Slate Technology

What Next TBD: Bots! What Are They Good For?

Slate Technology

Slate

Society & Culture, Technology, History

4.6636 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Elon Musk isn't wrong that Twitter has a bot problem. But he's kind of missing the point. Guest: Samuel Woolley Host: Lizzie O'Leary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:33.5

When I got Sam Wully on the line, I asked him to help me look for bots on Twitter.

0:38.5

Okay, let's look. Okay, wow, Elon Musk has 97.1 million followers. That is a heck of a lot of Twitter followers for anyone.

0:47.6

Specifically, bots that follow Elon Musk. Sam's an assistant professor in the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin.

0:55.6

He's also the co-author of a new book, literally titled bots.

1:00.6

And I'm going to go to this site, Botometer, which is kind of the industry standard for checking for bot followers.

1:09.4

It looks like his score in terms of like bot-like followers is a 1.1 out of 5 according to their

1:16.4

rankings.

1:17.5

And what does that mean?

1:18.6

I mean, basically what I'm seeing on Elon Musk's follower scores are that about roughly

1:23.0

about 20% of Elon's followers have some bot-like looking activity.

1:29.9

And do you want to check me while we're at it so we can compare us?

1:33.7

Yeah, sure.

1:34.2

Why not?

1:34.7

Let's do it.

1:35.2

Okay.

1:35.8

So I'm Lizzie O'Reilly, L-I-E-O-H-R-E-A-L-L-L-Y.

1:41.7

Okay.

...

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