Twitter: Who Is Real, Who Isn't?

July 4, 2013 — Tweet timing can differentiate individual, corporate and bot-controlled Twitter accounts independent of the language or content of a tweet, according to research published July 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Aldo Faisal and Gabriela Tavares from Imperial College London, UK.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, the study also found corporate-managed accounts tweeted more during work hours, personal accounts were more active in the afternoons and evenings, and bot-controlled accounts either tweeted at regular, constant intervals through the day, or had sudden bursts of activity at one or a few specific hours. Senior author Faisal concludes, "The identification and classification of specific types of users on Twitter can be useful for a variety of purposes, from the computational social sciences, focusing advertisement and political campaigns, to filtering spam, identity theft and malicious accounts."

Link to paper through link.