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Celebrities¹ Tweet Like Bots

大V账户——更博的是名人还是机器？

Twitter has more than 300 million monthly active users. But researchers have estimated that between about 30 million and 50 million of those are Twitter bots—automated accounts that do the bidding of their code-writing creators.

推特拥有超过3亿月度活跃用户。但据研究人员估计，其中约3000万到5000万是推特机器人——即一些执行编程人员编码命令的自动账户

"There could newsbots, and there could be spam bots." Zafar Gilani, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. "Or there could be bots doing political infiltration², which is obviously bad. Or social infiltration which could be bad."

“有新闻机器人，也有垃圾邮件机器人。”英国剑桥大学的博士生扎法尔·吉拉尼说道，“有可能是机器人在进行政治渗透，而这显然是很糟糕的。又或者是机器人在进行社会渗透，而这也非常不好。”

\Not all bots are bad. Some are just geeky, like a bot that describes imaginary exoplanets. Or another that tweets only prime numbers. "It really depends on who the botmaster is and what are the intentions and what are the motivations."

但并非所有的机器人都是坏的。有一些仅仅是比较讨厌，比如一种描述虚构的系外行星的机器人，或者另一种只发质数消息的机器人。“它还是取决于谁是幕后操控者，其意图是什么，动机又是什么。”

Gilani and his colleagues built an algorithm to single out bots from human accounts, using factors like tweet frequency or content, and how much users interacted with other users. And the system was able to tell bot from human 86 percent of the time.

吉拉尼和他的同事们利用发推文的频率或内容，以及与其他用户的互动程度等因素建立了一种运算法则，将机器人从真人账户中挑选了出来。这个系统将人类与机器人区分开的准确率为86%。

But in the case of celebrity³ accounts—people with more than 10 million followers—the bots and humans were harder to tell apart. Because both tend to tweet with more scheduled regularity⁴ than the average human. Both follow relatively⁵ few people. And both upload a lot of content.

但对于拥有超过1000万粉丝的名人账户，则很难区分是机器人还是人类。因为与一般人相比，这两者都倾向于更有计划地发推文，关注的人都相对比较少。而且两者都会上传很多内容。

They differ in the details: celebrities don't post as many URLs luring⁶ people off Twitter. And they don't retweet as often as bots do.

不过他们在细节上有所不同：名人不会在推特上发布太多有链接的推文。而且他们不像机器人那样经常转发。

The researchers presented the findings at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Sydney, Australia.

研究人员在澳大利亚悉尼举办的“社会网络分析和挖掘进展国际会议”上展示了这些研究结果。

As bots get smarter and more pervasive⁷ online, we humans can still console ourselves with a different discovery by Gilani: that tweets penned by humans get 19 times more likes than tweets by bots. And 10 times more retweets. So, at least in Twitter popularity, humans still beat the bots…for now.

虽然机器人变得越来越智能，越来越普遍，人类仍然能够用吉拉尼的一项研究结果来安慰自己：人类发布的推文获得的点赞量是机器人发布推文获得点赞量的19倍，转发量则是机器人的10倍。所以，至少在推特的世界，与机器人相比人类仍然暂居于上风……