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

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.

Specifically, bots that follow Elon Musk.

Sam's an assistant professor in the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin.

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

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

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

And what does that mean?

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

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

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

Yeah, sure. Why not? Let's do it. Okay. So I'm Lizzie O'Reilly, L-I-E-O-H-R-E-A-L-L-Y.

Okay.

I like that.

That's a good play on words.

Here we go.

Yeah, so your score is significantly better on botometer.

You're getting a 0.2 out of 5.

Which means I have a lower proportion of bot followers than Musk does.

That makes sense.

Bots tend to follow big accounts.

And I have 67,000 followers compared to his 97 million.

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