If you want to say something out loud, hoping that the world will see, your best chances would be to tweet something on Twitter.
The platform is straightforward but powerful, and has paved its popularity through simplicity.
While all social media networks may be plagued by bots, Twitter is the most prominent. Twitter analytics tool Followerwonk on March 5th, 2017 shared Twitter is deleting/suspending accounts at an unprecedented rate
In 30 days period, Twitter has 2.18 million new accounts registered, but deleted/suspended 3.18 million.
Without a doubt, Twitter has a bot problem, and this has been its problem for years.
Twitter is deleting/suspending accounts at an unprecedented rate. In the past 30 days we have detected:
‣ 2.18 million new accounts
‣ 3.18 million deleted/suspended
We've never seen a net loss over 30 days, before.— Followerwonk (@followerwonk) March 5, 2018
Back in 2013, Twitter said that around 5 percent of the accounts on its platform were fakes, or bots. What this means, 10.75 million users were fake. In a more recent research, it was estimated that fake accounts are making up at around 15 percent of the platform's total user count.
This means that there are about 49.5 million fake Twitter users.
This bot issue came into the spotlight when social platforms were found to spread misinformation, one of which was creating division among voters during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election campaign, with both Twitter and Facebook having the biggest roles in amplifying gossip spreads.
Fake accounts on Twitter are found to be extremely powerful in spreading information, making them extremely popular among ">companies, celebrities and influencers.
This bias skews Twitter’s algorithm which favors content from more prominent users, and with higher engagement stats.
Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that false stories on Twitter are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the true ones. Russian-backed or not, "the bot results points to human judgement and human decision making as being a potentially more important factor than we might have thought," he said.
After all, lies spread faster than the truth.
Here Twitter comes to a crossroad.
On hand hand, it needs to do something to stop this toxic environment from thriving on its platform. But on the other hand, the social media is already struggling to add more users. Removing users (even if they are bots) will hurt the platform's total user count.
Either choice Twitter makes may not please investors, but a bot purging would certainly improve the results of advertisers, and help non-users get a better understanding of what’s actually popular, and actually relevant.
Further reading: Admitting Of Its Toxic Environment, Twitter Raises The White Flag And Asks For Help