A new study conducted by cybersecurity firm CHEQ found that nearly 12% of all Twitter traffic is derived from bots, with CHEQ’s CEO noting that the number “could be significantly higher.”
Twitter self-reported bots as consisting of less than 5% of its traffic during a valuation earlier this year, following African-American tech billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy the platform.
In a statement released on Monday, CHEQ cast doubt on Twitter’s favorable claims about itself pertaining to AI accounts.
“Global cybersecurity company, CHEQ, released new data today casting light on Twitter’s bot numbers,” the press release stated. “The company analyzed 5.21 million website visits originating from Twitter, using over 2,000 cybersecurity tests to determine each user’s authenticity.”
MORE – CEO of CHEQ added that "it seems very likely that bot traffic inside the platform [#Twitter] itself could be significantly higher than 12%."
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 30, 2022
“The study found that 11.71% of all visits were driven by bots or fake users, including spambots, scrapers, botnets, click farms and automation tools, as well as other forms of fake, fraudulent and non-human traffic,” the statement continued.
“The data suggests that Twitter’s bot problem is probably larger than 5%,” said Guy Tytunovich, Founder and CEO of CHEQ, “Our study looked into users who came from Twitter to other websites. But, if you consider that many bots don’t click through to other sites and only stay on Twitter, then it seems very likely that bot traffic inside the platform itself could be significantly higher than 12%. Ultimately, we’re living in the era of the Fake Web, where bots, malicious users and automation tools make up a large portion of all web traffic, and this data supports what we’re seeing out there.”
SparkToro, a software company that roots out fake “bot” accounts known as “spambots” from social media companies found that nearly half of Joe Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are not real humans earlier this month.
