They define active as having tweeted in the last 90 days.

I'm active on twitter, check it every other day, follow @ElonMusk but I don't tweet. Perhaps I'm a unique case, or their assumptions are a bit off.

Some metrics they consider suspicious (from the article):

1) Accounts that didn't tweet recently

2) Accounts with low number of tweets

3) Accounts with a low number of followers

4) Accounts that didn't set up their own profile image

Lurking != bot, and these data-points would all hit high for lurkers. I'm somewhat suspicious of their results, especially given the results from this pew study suggesting the majority of twitter users don't tweet very much.

25% of Twitter Users Produce 97% of All Tweets: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...

I am the same, in fact my account has never posted a thing ever, never liked at thing ever, I just follow people I want to see updates from that is all.

I treat it like RSS not Social Media

Look my username

With Twitters' changes to ask people to log in to see most content the number of lurkers probably shot up.

I'm now wondering what % of overall tweets are from that 1/5th of bots.

If it's 1-1 then 20% of tweets being from bots isn't great - but it could even be more than that.

Same here I never tweet but follow a few people.

I think it's connected to a more general phenomenon though. Pewdiepie has 111 million subscribers on YT and gets like 3-5 million views per video. Like 95% of his subscribers don't watch his videos.

I've subscribed to a bunch of people on Youtube whos videos I no longer watch.

I think Youtube's UI "encourages" this behaviour even more as it has a highly algorithmic homepage rather than a feed of people you follow.

Sounds accurate if you go through the comments under his tweets, a ton of url spam and scam 'trader' bots

The ratio of fake Elon Musk accounts to real Elon Musk accounts is probably even funnier.