Twitter (TWTR) has revealed that 23 million of its active users are actually bots.
These bots are set up by humans to take care of posting to Twitter and make up 8.5% of its monthly active user base. While that’s a good bit of bots, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The social media giant estimates that only less than 5% of its active users are spam bots, reports Quartz.
However, the news that over 8% of Twitter users aren’t actually people could be upsetting to advertisers. After all, what’s the point of taking out an advertisement for a bot that can’t look at or buy anything from the advertiser? If advertisers are worried about bots, then the social media website should be as well, Quartz notes.
Twitter’s monthly active users number 271 million, but CEO Dick Costolo believes that the social media website could actually be reaching two to three times as many people as this.
TWTR shares were up 2% as of Tuesday morning.
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