[blindm]

I always wondered: how many of these tweets are just Justin Bieber fandom type posts, bots, spam, or other dross? Twitter is infamous for its bad signal to noise ratio. These researchers need to write algos to filter out all the noise

[edent]

What's wrong with that? If you wanted to investigate, say, the rise of The Beatles - wouldn't you love to have access to the random thoughts of their fans in the 1960s?

Similarly, if you're researching bots and spam and how they manipulate people & markets - this is still useful.

[adolph]

Are there researchers out there using bot accounts to prospectively experiment with social media researchers?

[sigil]

A lot! I ran named entity recognition on the Twitter garden hose back in 2012. The top entities were Bieber and the Jonas brothers.