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.
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.
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 am definitely between 2 and 3 in the above classification, and so are many of my contacts I would say.
[edit: can't* scale]
