Skip to main content

Bots, not humans, tweet majority of links to popular websites, research says

It’s no secret that Twitter is largely populated by bots, automated programs that often act under the guise of being an actual human, but new findings out of the Pew Research Center helps quantify their activity.

Bots account for two-thirds of tweets that link to popular websites, according to the report, and have a tendency to share adult content, sports, and news with particular vigor.

Recommended Videos

The report comes after many months of revelations into the role bots have played in spreading fake news across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, potentially influencing votes from the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum to the 2016 United States presidential election. In November, Twitter updated its policy on bots to limit them to sharing “helpful information” and running “creative campaigns.”

Not all bots are inherently bad. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa have been given intimate access to our everyday lives, helping many of us manage the chaos of the 21st century. Across social media, some bots send out emergency alerts in the wake of natural disasters, while others help keep bands and brands in contact with their fans.

But many bots are created specifically to spam, troll, and mislead readers with sensational and falsified information.

In their study, the Pew researchers took a random sampling of 1.2 million English-language tweets during a month and a half in the summer of 2017. Their goal was to find out how many of these links were shared by bots, and what topics the bots seemed to focus on.

Using a computer program to track each tweet to its destination, they saved those websites to a database, and selected the nearly 3,000 most common websites. They then counted how many of these tweets derived from bots, a process that meant classifying more than a million tweets and determining which accounts were automated (something many bot accounts don’t openly confess).

To make their job easier, the researchers used Botometer, a machine-learning algorithm that uses more than a thousand bits of information from a given account to make a decision on whether or not the account is a bot. Botometer takes into consideration factors like content, who the account follows, and how long the account has existed. Rather than give a flat-out score of yes or no, the program offers a score between zero and one, which researchers then use to inform their own decision on whether an account is a bot or not.

In the end, the Pew researchers determined that 66 percent of links to popular websites originated from bots. By breaking these links down by topic, they determined that 90 percent of adult content links, 76 percent of sports links, and 66 percent of news links derived from bots.

While these findings may seem intimidating, the Pew team notes that they have yet to answer some key questions. For example, they don’t know how truthful the information shared is nor how humans have interacted with this content. Either way, the report supports the idea that, if you click a link on Twitter, it probably came from a bot.

Dyllan Furness
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more