Twitter: 8.5 percent of all active accounts are automated

Twitter has announced in a regulatory filing that “up to approximately 8.5%” of its active accounts are completely automated “without any discernible additional user-initiated action.”The social media giant has 271 million active monthly users, so automated accounts are up to 23 million of those.Among the automatically updated accounts are handles at post directly from third-party apps like dlvr.it, or that post pictures that were shared on Facebook or Instagram, for example, without the user having to go to Twitter at any point. 

Unfortunately included in the group are spam accounts, which account for less than 5% of monthly active users, says Twitter. 

Real, human-backed active accounts are what advertisers are looking into when judging Twitter’s potential, and 8.5 percent of accounts never seeing an ad is a large figure.