http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/one_in_12_tweeps_are_bots/
By Richard Chirgwin, 13 Aug 2014
In its latest SEC filing, Twitter has enumerated what its users have long believed: a small but significant slab of its accounts aren't humans.
According to the filing, Twitter says it's created a “new metric that is comprised of only such active users” that run updates “when there was no discernible user action involved”.
While users would probably react with “I know, right?” to the news, the metrics are of much greater import to advertisers, since bots are worthless targets for advertising.
As noted by Zac Seward over at Quartz, Twitter's estimate means that around 23 million of the claimed 271 million monthly active users (MAUs) are in some way automated.
That's not only spam accounts, since some of the MAUs might be automated news feeds (our own @theregister blends automated and real live human emissions). Regarding spambots, Twitter says: “We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that false or spam accounts represented less than 5 per cent of our MAUs” – without, however, revealing anything about the size of the sample or the methodology.
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