I use twitter daily and I believe most of the content I see is real people? Perhaps that's just based on who I follow so I don't have the same experience as you.
I think it depends on the topic. I don't think you will find many sockpuppet accounts when you are talking about some CS programming framework... but you want to talk about politics? Its where the culture war is being waged.
Sure - no one thinks Twitter (or anyone) knows the exact count for real users, etc. But fraudulent activity and bot development is also driven by the underlying success of the website (scammers don't scam where there's no one to scam) so there's reason to pay attention to relative changes (or lack of change) in overall patterns.
If their numbers are completely fraudulent why would they release fraudulent numbers indicating they missed their targets?
While there may be a flood of bots and sock puppet accounts, it’s worth noting that advertisers wouldn’t be spending if they couldn’t see actual conversions from Twitter ads. So there are at least enough real people on there for their advertising business to work.
That's not necessarily totally true. The advertising world is susceptible to FOMO just as much as other people. Companies authorize their ad agencies to come up with a campaign and agree on an ad spend for that year/campaign. That money gets split up to cover as many markets as possible. If a competitor is spending on Twitter, then you spend on Twitter as well. You can't give the competitor the entire Twitter market.
how do we know you're not a bot?
Aye, Twitter seems to be mostly a social network for bots and people’s scripts to talk to each other. Very few real humans posting original thoughts. Maybe celebrity types use it as an easy way to get a word out, but not the common man. Fascinating.
I wouldn't be surprised if most celebrity tweets are just written up in advance by their spokesperson and doled out throughout the week with a script.
I think that even political speeches are written in a way that they can easily be twitted.