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Perhaps you too have experienced the amazing honor of being tagged alongside complete strangers in a tweet from another complete stranger linking to a website called paper(dot)li. Needless to say, you're far from alone.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First off, what is paper(dot)li? Briefly, it's a service that find news articles based on Twitter searches, publishes a list of the articles, and tweets a link to the list from an attached Twitter account. (We used it and IFTTT to run @Garexit.)
To study the tagging behavior, we downloaded 96 hours' worth of tweets posted via paper(dot)li and linking to the site, yielding 26572 tweets from 7187 accounts. These accounts tagged 16522 accounts over the timespan in question.
How does paper(dot)li decide which accounts to tag? The explanation on the site is a bit vague, but it appears to list three randomly selected accounts that tweeted one or more of the news articles incorporated into the linked "paper."
Paper(dot)li ninja-tags some accounts more often than others. News organizations (including the Spanish version of RT) and web marketing/SEO stuff comprise the favored targets, with quite a long tail: the 7160 accounts we analyzed tagged 673183 accounts in their last 200 tweets.
Many of the accounts that use paper(dot)li make use of other automation tools as well - 3816 of 7187 (53.1%) of those we studied use at least one other service. 4305 accounts (59.9%) are at least 90% automated.
