In order to determine whether bots can be accurately detected, how bots behave, and how they impact Twitter activity, the researchers divided accounts into categories based on total number of followers, and found that accounts with more than 10 million followers tend to retweet at similar rates to bots. In accounts with fewer followers however, bots tend to retweet far more than humans. These celebrity-level accounts also tweet at roughly the same pace as bots with similar follower numbers, whereas in smaller accounts, bots tweet far more than humans. Bots, like people, can be malicious or benign. The term “bot” is often associated with spam, offensive content or political infiltration, but many of the most reputable organizations in the world also rely on bots for their social media channels. For example, major news organizations, such as CNN or the BBC, who produce hundreds of pieces of content daily, rely on automation to share the news in the most efficient way. These accounts, while classified as bots, are seen by users as trustworthy sources of information. “A Twitter user can be a human and still be a spammer, and an account can be operated by a bot and still be benign,” said Zafar Gilani, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, who led the research. “We’re interested in seeing how effectively we can detect automated accounts and what effects they have.” Bots have been on Twitter for the majority of the social network’s existence—it’s been estimated that anywhere between 40% and 60% of all Twitter accounts are bots. Some bots have tens of millions of followers, although the vast majority have less than a thousand—human accounts have a similar distribution.