Just how many bots does Twitter have?

New data released by the social media platform caused some major confusion this week.

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We can glean something from the 11 percent figure, though, as the roughly 8.5 percent of users on third party apps that can only auto-pull is contained in that figure, Twitter said. That means the remaining chunk—as little as 2.5 percent—indicates the percentage of users using third party apps that don’t have the capacity to auto-pull, Twitter said. So what does that mean? The users in this 2.5 percent group are using third party apps that may have the capacity to automatically post content in an authentic, non-spamming manner—friendly “bots,” if you will—such as the Earthquake Robot feed, which automatically tweets news about earthquakes.

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