IN ITS LAST report, Twitter said it has 271 million users on its site every month, but the question of how many of those are bots accounts has been revealed.

In a recent filing first spotted by Quartz, the company revealed that roughly 23 million of its active users are bot accounts, mainly those accounts which update automatically about news, alerts and other info.

In other words:

“Only up to approximately 8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action.”

In layman terms, bot accounts refer to users like this.

And ones performing invaluable services like this.

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Spam accounts, on the other hand, aren’t the same as bot accounts and are estimated to make up “less than 5%” of accounts according to Twitter. This would amount to 13.5 million accounts at most. 

According to Quartz, the information was revealed to help clarify an earlier statement that 14% of its active users access the service outside the official site and apps. By its own calculations, roughly 8 million use Tweetdeck or Twitter for Mac while 7 million use third-party clients.

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