followers The majority of Twitter accounts following public figures and brands are often fake or inactive, making the number of Twitter followers a celebrity has a difficult metric for gauging popularity. While this cannot always be helped, some public figures who have gained or lost huge quantities of followers in short periods of time have been accused of discreetly paying for Twitter followers. For example, the Twitter accounts of Sean Combs, Rep Jared Polis (D-Colo), PepsiCo, Mercedes-Benz, and 50 Cent have come under scrutiny for possibly engaging in the buying and selling of Twitter followers, which is estimated to be between a $40 million and $360 million business annually. Account sellers may charge a premium for more realistic accounts that have Twitter profile pictures and bios and retweet the accounts they follow. In addition to an ego boost, public figures may gain more lucrative endorsement contracts from inflated Twitter metrics. For brands, however, the translation of online buzz and social media followers into sales has recently come under question after The Coca-Cola Company disclosed that a corporate study revealed that social media buzz does not create a spike in short term sales. Identification It is sometimes desirable to identify when a Twitter account is controlled by a internet bot. Following a test period, Twitter rolled out labels to identify bot accounts and automated tweets in February 2022. Detecting non-human Twitter users has been of interest to academics. In a 2012 paper, Chu et al. propose the following criteria that indicate that an account may be a bot (they were designing an automated system): "Periodic and regular timing" of tweets; Whether the tweet content contains known spam; and The ratio of tweets from mobile versus desktop, as compared to an average human Twitter user. Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California used artificial intelligence to identify Twitter bots. He found that humans reply to other tweets four or five times more than bots and that bots continue to post longer tweets over time. Bots also post at more regular time gaps, for example, tweeting at 30-minute or 60-minute intervals. Indiana University has developed a free service called Botometer (formerly BotOrNot), which scores Twitter handles based on their likelihood of being a Twitterbot. Recent research from EPFL argued that classifying a Twitter account as bot or not may not be always possible because hackers take over human accounts and use them