Why Twitter's 30 million bots are here to stay

Bots are a thriving part of Twitter's user base, and it's likely they'll continue showing up alongside our own human tweets.

Twitter bots can be thought of as autonomous programs or entities that generate social content. Some of this content is harmless, like sports updates, and some of it intentionally malicious and polarizing — like the over 1,600 known bots that tweeted extremist right-wing views during the polarizing 2016 campaign, explored in a recent report from Bloomberg.

The influence of bots is strong, and much of this strength comes from sheer numbers. Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Southern California and Indiana University suggested that between nine and 15 percent of of Twitter users are actually bots. Twitter has around 328 million users globally, so even if the low estimate is taken, that's 30 million bots.

But for Twitter, this sizable bot population is not an unfavorable reality, because it makes the financially struggling social platform look more popular and influential that it actually might be. If Twitter were to become proficient at eliminating the bots on its platform, the service's worth to advertisers and investors would likely take a considerable hit.

In July, Twitter's earnings and user report proved its somewhat tenuous financial situation. The company said it had 328 million users, which showed zero growth from March. In contrast, Facebook reported it added 70 million new users during the same period. What's more, Twitter's advertising revenue fell from this same point in 2016, from $535 million to $489 million.

The result? Investors didn't like this, and Twitter's stock plunged 13 percent.

So as popular as Twitter is among politicians, news outlets, and the plugged-in public, it needs all the social engagement it can get from its users to show advertisers how heavily-viewed the platform is. This means retweets, likes, and comments — even if people are retweeting a Russian bot.

Speaking of, Twitter contends it's making efforts to fight bots and spam that spread misinformation intended to interfere with the election process. In a Sept. 28 blog post, Twitter said it had identified over 200 malicious accounts and suspended them from Twitter.

When reached for comment, a Twitter spokesperson stated the company is using bot-detection techniques to stop bots from tweeting before they start. They emphasized the following statement from the blog post cited above:

These techniques now help us catch about 450,000 suspicious logins per day. Importantly, much of this defensive work is done through machine learning and automated processes on our back end, and we have been able to significantly improve our automatic spam and bot-detection tools, resulting in a 64% year-over-year increase in suspicious logins we’re able to detect.

These efforts might be well-intentioned, but millions of bots are still alive and tweeting. Certainly not all bots are Russian attempts to roil and manipulate American voters. But Twitter's bottom line, like all companies, may outweigh its desire to rid itself of a bot infestation.