What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Bots! What Are They Good For?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2022
⏱️ 27 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
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Transcript
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| 1:07.5 | When I got Sam Wolley on the line, I asked him to help me look for bots on Twitter. |
| 1:12.2 | Okay, let's look. Okay, wow. Elon Musk has 97.1 million followers. That is a heck of a lot of |
| 1:19.6 | Twitter followers for anyone. Specifically bots that follow Elon Musk. Sam's assistant professor |
| 1:26.0 | in the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin. He's also the co-author of a new book |
| 1:32.0 | literally titled bots. And I'm going to go to this site, a bottom meter, which is kind of the |
| 1:38.0 | industry standard for checking for bot followers. It looks like his score in terms of bot like |
| 1:46.2 | followers is a 1.1 out of 5 according to their rankings. And what does that mean? |
| 1:52.4 | I mean, basically what I'm seeing on Elon Musk's followers scores are that about roughly about 20% |
| 1:58.8 | of Elon's followers have some bot-like looking activity. And do you want to check me while we're |
| 2:05.6 | at it? So we can compare us? Yeah, sure. Why not? Let's do it. Okay, so I'm Lizzie O'Reilly, |
| 2:11.2 | L-I-C-Z-I-E-O-H-R-E-A-L-L-Y. Okay. I like that. That's a good plan, Words. Here we go. |
... |
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