[throwawaypanda]

>But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing.

I would dispute that. I'd argue that the bots exist because spamming twitter is free. If it costs me $0 and I get even a tiny benefit out of it then it is to my advantage.

Its essentially the same problem as spam email.

[rapind]

We tweet the scores of our games automatically from our backend. There's no profit in it, but our members appreciate it based on follows and retweets. That's real people following and retweeting. I actually comb through and remove obviously fake accounts from following us.

I think this is a legitimate use of a bot. We even mention the host club because they want us to.

What's funny is that the account got squelched 3 times before we got a human at twitter to officially prevent us from getting flagged. So they do definitely have some measures in place to prevent spam accounts. I suspect it's become non-trivial to identify all the bad actors.

[MBCook]

That sounds fair. Maybe it’s more of a volume issue. You get one or two ‘bot tweets’ per day without paying.

I know lots of people also use bots for cross posting from Instagram or something else. Or to post when they put a new article up on their site.

I’m sure you’d have to allow them to some degree. But there are some really noisy bots out there that need a fee attached to em.