Twitter Says 8.5% of Monthly Active Users are Bots, Less are Spam

As many as 23 million of Twitter's (TWTR) 271 million monthly active users are actually bots, according to the company. In a recent SEC filing, Twitter disclosed that approximately 8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted its servers for updates without any discernible user-initiated action. These bots aren't necessarily spam accounts, however. Twitter estimates that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of its monthly active users. The microblogging site says it's continually seeking to better estimate the number of spam accounts. Twitter also said more users than it thought are seeing ads. TheStreet's Brittany Umar has details from New York.