As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren't people, says study

CNBC ^ | Michael Newberg

[ConservativeStatement]

A big chunk of those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your Twitter (TWTR)account may not be coming from human hands. According to new research from the University of Southern California, up to 15 percent of Twitter accounts are in fact bots rather than people.

The research could be troubling news for Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base in the face of growing competition from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and others.

[Dilbert San Diego]

Two points I would make.....

1. Years ago, I set up a facebook account, but have never used it. I just never got into it, and don’t use it.

2. Recently a friend of mine died. He had a very extensive facebook account, using it a lot, documenting his activities in life. But he’s passed on, so what happens to his facebook account? Does Facebook have a way to know accounts are dormant, inactive, people like me who don’t use them? Do they have any way of tracking people like my friend who died?

[scrabblehack]

So far as I can tell, facebook doesn’t want to delete dormant accounts. I belong to a club which has two facebook accounts.
They were both set up by former officers, but one left town and forgot the password - even forgot which e-mail account it’s attached to.

We tried to delete the account but could not.

[Tallguy]

I have had a few friends & acquaintances who have died recently. Their FB accounts live-on. I too have been wondering if FB has a mechanism to kill inactive accounts. Can a family contact FB to have a loved one’s account closed?

[rlmorel]

LOL, it is just too small to read...I tried pulling it into photoshop and enlarging it, but...it just blows it up unintelligibly!

[Chode]

i want to debate with people on the internet but i worry i’m not smart enough.

maybe i’ll just read what the smart people are saying.

ok, i’m in... 8^)

[rlmorel]

Hehehe...yep. Dogbert alright!