Beware the Twitter Bots

Does this look like a real person to you?

It’s not. We checked.

We know of the Twitter “bot” phenomenon because someone at some organization has created some bots that automatically share headlines from certain blogs (one of which is ours).

It boosts our Twitter numbers on screen, but it’s also more than a little creepy.

This Wall Street Journal report tries to get to the bottom of the whole thing, and the “rapper” mentioned in the piece—who followed us personally for some reason—says “If you’re not padding your numbers, you’re not doing it right.”

Oh yeah?

Twitter bots can be useful in a supervillain-y sort of way by falsely giving the impression that hundreds or thousands of people are sharing a certain piece of content or posting a trending hashtag.

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