Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
Twitter is in a dire situation.  As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis.<p>I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots.<p>How bad was it?  After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users.  That signal to noise ratio is dismal, and detrimental to the core product experience.  Twitter must be forced to maintain this fake high activity to prop up the share price.<p>BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr.  Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers.  Tumblr today is drowning in porn.