About 13.5 million microblogs are run by bots

The number of Twitter users is 271 million people. However, according to the microblogging service's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, some of this is due to bots, which could harm the company's revenue.

Photo: Vladislav Sodel, Kommersant / buy photo

The number of active Twitter users is currently about 271 million people. However, not all of them are human. According to the microblogging service's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, "about 8.5% of all active users used third-party applications that could automatically connect to Twitter servers to constantly update blogs without any human intervention." That is, 23 million registered users never visit the microblogging site.

True, this does not mean that they are all bots. This number, for example, includes those users who blog through other applications, such as Instagram: the user can simply share the posted photo on all social networks, including Twitter, without visiting their pages. The service itself states that the number of spam bots does not exceed 5% of the total number of users, that is, it has about 13.5 million accounts.

The company is fighting exclusively with the latter category. The fact is that the presence of bots greatly harms Twitter's profit, the only source of which is advertisements. In addition to the fact that spam scares away users, it also prevents the company from providing accurate data to partners who are ready to place their advertisements on the service pages. It becomes impossible to give exact figures on the number of users interested in a particular product or service, as well as on the client’s possible profit, when an audience of several million does not reflect real human interests. Twitter mentioned this in its application in the list of possible risks for the company.

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