Kelby is a real person, one I have known for years, but online she barely seems to exist. She is one of the vast majority of people, to have never had a personal website, tried to be YouTube famous, published a press release, or even a blog post. Her Facebook Account is set to mostly friends only, and otherwise, she has, basically no online footprint. She is on Twitter, using just her first name on an account with about 10 followers. Her account tweets very few things that are personally identifiable. Honestly, she seemingly exists to retweet Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson. Outside of a couple of photos of her child, Kelby looks indistinguishable from the common idea of a bot. While tools like Botometer do label Kelby a human, many people wouldn’t instantly assume her humanity. Fake Accounts Are Hard To Spot By most metrics people look for, like having only a partial photo of her face for a profile pic, having a disproportionately high number of retweets to original tweets, few followers and interactions with just a small handful of accounts, she looks fake. She’s not. She’s part of, if not the majority on Twitter, at least a healthy normal subset of users. I’ve been shocked by the number of times I’ve had real conversations with accounts that set off the same “this is a bot” alarm bells as Kelby. Another friend of mine, Gary Leland has been on the internet since there was an internet. Leland started…My Friend Kelby, Why Online Bots Are Hard To Spot