It seems like there are 4 categories of Twitter users:

1. Blue checks

2. People who are “obviously” people (PII listed)

3. “Anonymous people”. I see a lot of theses, people with the name “iluvcrypt0” and an emoji of a Pokémon.

4. “Obvious” bots.

From looking at thread responses on twitter I think group 3 is probably the biggest, On the Luna thread someone posted to a link of posts that were implying they lost all their money due to Luna crashing, and it was a lot of group 3 posters. but of course each of these categories has a certain percentage likelihood that they are a bot. Im sure there are a few blue checks that slipped through and there are probably a few “obvious bots” who manually post.

The question is really the makeup of group 3. How many people who seem like anonymous users are actually bots, and can they prove that (when of course Twitter is incentivized to err low)

Also, either way, group 3 doesnt seem like they are contributing to the marketplace of ideas, they seem more like trolls/shit posters.

What about people who were banned and called Russian bots for their political opinions — Do they count as real people or bots?

> What about _people_

I think you answered your own question, if you’re using the word “people” then they’re not bots.

Category 2 if they used PII, category 3 if they didn’t.

An account that is shared between bots and humans is likely. More of a "bot augmentation". Eg a script that runs during certain hours or to handle high volume during certain periods.

Then it's almost a question of "how botty" the account in question is.

I think we're probably using the word "bots" to include "human-based mass creation and use of twitter accounts". Like if I make 100 twitter accounts to promote <thing>, they count as "bots" here, even if I did it all by hand. If we're not, we should be.

Given that, I'm not sure there is much "bot augmentation" on otherwise human twitter accounts. It would be strange to do that if you were only using one account.

If this is true, where’s the proof of a conspiracy? This is similar to the thing about phones listening to conversations and then some app shows a relevant ad: where’s the conspiracy?

What you outline above implies something like an affiliate/recruiting program to find accounts to “co-house” your bot within. Especially with the implication that they operate on behalf of USian political parties.

I think there's another category:

5. Users with plausible names and a profile photo of a person that are bots

I don't remember the study but when there were studies coming out of believed Russian-controlled accounts supposedly amplifying misinformation, all the examples I saw were in category 5.

And this category is the most deceptive. Nobody cares what a Twitter egg says. People care about supposedly grassroots outrage / support / etc. from supposedly legitimate people.

I think there are many more categories. I am on Twitter with a pseudonym, and while it is not bot-looking, it is obviously not a real name. At first glance I may or may not be a bot run by somebody else. I can be Googled easily and you will find some PII there, such as my employer, but it would take some checking that you can't scale.

I am definitely between 2 and 3 in the above classification, and so are many of my contacts I would say.

[edit: can't* scale]

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether to include this as a false positive in category 2 or it's own category but yes your point stands.

Also, if they already know there is X amount of bots, why don't they just...ummm...delete those accounts already?

There's no reason to go through every single account to find the true number of bots. At the scale of Twitter they could just randomly sample a set of accounts, run detailed analysis on them, and statistically extrapolate onto the entire userbase with confidence bounds.