Last month when Twitter hinted that it has a bit of a bot problem many of us wondered exactly what the numbers were on this. Today we get a much more clear picture of this problem thanks to a filing that Twitter has made with the Security & Exchange Commission. According to the filing nearly 9 percent of Twitter’s active accounts are actually bots that don’t necessarily have a human operating them.
As per the latest numbers provided by Twitter the microblogging network has over 271 million active accounts and the bots account for 8.5 percent, over 23 million accounts that are run through third-party applications without direct input from an actual person.
Its imperative to point out that this doesn’t mean there are 23 million accounts on Twitter that tweet spammy links or are involved in scams of any kind. A perfectly fine example of a bot is an account of a new service that automatically posts links to new stories.
The reason why Twitter is revealing this information is to provide a much more accurate picture to stockholders about its user growth, which some have criticized over the past year for being sluggish following Twitter’s IPO.
Apart from shareholders, advertisers might not be too happy about the increasing number of accounts being run on autopilot. They get less bang for their buck if the ads are not being served to an actual human who might interact with it.
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