This guy's got more randomness than you could ever hope to have.
No matter what kind of personality a company's corporate Twitter account has, or how well a bot is programmed, tweet timing alone can be used to tell the difference between corporate, individual, and bot accounts with more than 80 percent accuracy.
A program developed by Aldo Faisal at London's Imperial College doesn't even need to see the language or content of a tweet in order to make the distinction. As you'd maybe expect, Twitter accounts controlled by companies most often tweet during business hours, while bots often tweet at pre-determined intervals or spam tweets over a quick amount of time, according to Faisal's study, published in PLOS ONE.
"We examined the inter-tweet delay and tweet time distributions for [corporate, individual, and bot accounts], and found that they present very distinct tweeting patterns, allowing us to distinguish between them in an automated manner," Faisal writes. "We also found that the distribution of a user’s tweets throughout the day is closely related to their daily routine."
That makes sense, but here's where things get kinda weird: Turns out you and your wry observations are more predictable than a robot. Using what Faisal calls "a simple method" that essentially looks at your average interval between tweets and spits out an expected time for your next one, the model was better at predicting the exact time a human would tweet than the next time a bot would.
Twitter's best one-note jokebot
"Interestingly, we were better able to predict human-driven next tweet times than for the robot-driven accounts," Faisal writes. "The fact that robot-driven tweet times are less predictable than human tweet times may be the result of: A) bot-controlled accounts having programmed activities which vary considerably across individual bots and are therefore less uniform in their behavior or B) the result of bot-controlled accounts being more driven in a reflexive mode responding to external events (e.g. news)."
So basically, you're more of an mindless creature of routine than a robot, and that bot ain't fooling anyone. If it's as good as, say, @Horse_ebooks or even @StealthMountain, however, who really cares?