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by TheDong 1497 days ago
I don't buy the speculation as obviously accurate.

Let's say I own a twitter bot farm. I make 20k accounts, have a system setup that logs into each of them from a unique IP each month at random times to make sure they're not banned yet, and advertise it out. On month 1, someone buys 1000 of them as followers. On month 2, someone buys 1000 of them to tweet spam. etc etc.

Each month, there's 20k active bot accounts (logged in to verify they weren't banned). Only a small number may actually tweet though since buyers may have not gotten them yet. Bot accounts lurk too, for months on end, before ever acting.

I'm not claiming this is accurate, but I am claiming this is a reasonable alternative which doesn't align with the view of bot accounts being more prevalent in tweeting accounts than lurking accounts.