Earlier in August, it was reported that 8.5 percent of Twitter users, or 23 million accounts, were not actually people but bots, autonomous accounts that post without any human interaction. Twitter refuted this claim saying it was much closer to 5 percent, but that's still a big chunk of users. So now I'm wondering, should I be following any of these twitter bot accounts?
For what it's worth, I only follow one. Netflix_Bot, created by @zak123, is a pretty usefully little non-human who keeps me up to date with what shows and movies are new on Netflix. I've come across a few others, such as @DearAssistant, a bot that uses the computational engine Wolfram Alpha to answer any question, and @RedScareBot, which channels the Communist paranoia of Senator Joseph McCarthy via Twitter rants.
So what bots do you follow? With allegedly 23 million on Twitter, some of them have to be useful, or at very least funny, right?
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