23 million active Twitter users are actually bots

New York: As many as 23 million of Twitter's 271 million monthly active users are actually bots, according to the microblogging site.

Twitter said that approximately 8.5 per cent of the accounts it considers active are automatically updated "without any discernible additional user-initiated action."

These bots amount to about 23 million of Twitter's 271 million monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of June, the company said in a new filing, according to website 'Quartz'.

The new disclosure was an attempt to clarify an earlier statement that 14 per cent of MAUs access the service outside of the official website and mobile apps, by using Twitter's application programming interface (API).

Twitter's update specifies that the 14 per cent figure "included certain users who accessed Twitter through owned and operated applications."

Bots are not necessarily spam accounts, which according to Twitter make up less than 5 per cent of MAUs.

But since bots don't usually have any humans behind them, their presence would affect advertisers who are interested in reaching potential customers.