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"Twitter is being overwhelmed by spambots that undermine its value to advertisers \u2014 and to potential investors in its initial public offering \u2014 according to a University of Texas information scientist.\nSome 24% of tweets are created by automated bots, according to one study, some of which are spam. Several news media headline feeds are automated (not @BW, though). A handful of bots were programmed to tweet about earthquakes in California. Still others provide useful and weirdly personalized services.\nStill, the prevalence of nonpeople is a problem for the business\u2019s revenue model, writes Andrew Whinston, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas at Austin. Whinston sent a one-page analysis that he co-authored with graduate student Shun-Yang Lee to Bloomberg Businessweek on Tuesday. The short piece isn\u2019t intended for an academic journal.\nSEE ALSO: Don\u2019t Expect Twitter to Sweat Main Street Ad Sales\nAccording to the New York Times, eMarketer estimates that Twitter will make $583 million in revenue from advertising in 2013 and $950 million in 2014. It makes additional revenue from selling the data about its raw tweet feed. But Whinston suggests that Twitter bots could be deployed to the same marketing ends.\nWe could imagine an army of bots that appear as real people tweeting about certain products. The sheer word-of-mouth effect generated from these tweets could easily beguile gullible Twitter users and achieve reasonable marketing goals \u2014 without ever paying Twitter. Therefore, advertisers could potentially seek help from programmers to write bots to trick Twitter\u2019s authentication system and perform just as well as those costly promoted tweets and trending topics.\nHe suggests that Twitter protect its revenue model by tightening its spam filters and authentication mechanisms, either to eliminate bots or restrict them. Twitter is aware of the spambot problem but hasn\u2019t been responding to journalists\u2019 IPO-related questions, citing regulatory restrictions, since announcing its stock-sale plans in \u2014 of course \u2014 a tweet.\nSEE ALSO: The Twitter IPO: The Accidental Revolution Hurtles Toward Payday\nImage: Twitter"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/09/26/bots-and-spam-twitter-ipo/>