Twitter bots

This is going to be a short post. Mainly interested in people’s opinions so feel free to either comment or email me at udi @ industryreview.org.

 
We all know there’s a terrible spam problem at Twitter. Also, we all know there are lots of bots in Twitter.

 
People who know me even for a short amount of time know I have a very weird memory when it comes to numbers, personal details, birthdays (i.e. during college I remembered all my friends’ social security numbers. I didn’t even try, it just.. stuck somehow). This is a fun party trick, and extremely useful in professions which require remembering many details about lots of participants. Affiliate Marketing and Academia, two fields I’ve been in, are actually really good examples. Anyway, I’m diverging from my point.

 
Lately I noticed something which we all noticed, i.e. groups of Twitter users suddenly appearing with very similar characteristics & identical messages. I’m sure Twitter is very much onto them.

 
What bothers me a bit more is that I started noticing a group of users that until now I thought are really well established Twitter users, repeating the same sentences again and again. But not often (like the standard bots, which sometimes repeat the same sentences within minutes) but significantly less often, like once a day. These sentences seem to be identical, and at times meaningless – and don’t seem to promote any product. I would estimate there are at least 15-20 people in this group, from both sexes, various ages and ethnicities. That’s actually one of the thing that looked suspicious to me, why would a young girl repeat exactly the same sentence an elderly gentleman said a day before?

 
Maybe it’s just my overly active mind, and these are all real people who have the same sense of humor, and from some reason, decide to repeat the same sentences very infrequently, but to me this seems kind of odd. Maybe they all belong to a cult. A Twitter cult. I really don’t know.

 
I suspect these are much more advanced bots. Perhaps establishing themselves very subtly as ‘real people’, and occasionally, very infrequently, trying to promote a product (I haven’t been following them that closely to notice that until now).

 
I can definitely say that none of them has ever responded to a comment or a direct message I sent. I can also say that I tried repeating some of their sentences (by now I remember quite a few), and got no response. I’m somewhat wary of doing it more often in case this really is a group of bots and by doing so, I’ll be marked as one eventually.

 
Anyway: have you noticed this too? I’d rather not specify which sentences/users in case I incur the wrath of real people, or worse, a very aggressive bot operator. I’d really like to get feedback.