This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Twitter has more than 300 million monthly active users,

but researchers have estimated that between about 30 million and 50 million of those of There could be newsbots and there could be spam bots.

Zefar Gillani, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Or there could be bots which are doing political infiltration, which is obviously bad,

or social infiltration which could be bad.

Not all bots are bad though.

Some are just geeky, like a bot that describes imaginary exoplanets or another that

tweets only prime numbers.

It really depends on who the Bot Master is and

what are the intentions, what are the motivations.

Galani and his colleagues built an algorithm to single out bots from human accounts using factors like tweet frequency or content and how much users interacted with other users and the system was able to tell bot from human 86% of the time.

But in the case of celebrity accounts, people with more than 10 million

followers, the bots and humans were harder to tell apart. Because both tend to tweet with

more scheduled regularity than the average human, both follow relatively few people, and both upload a lot of content.

They differ in the details. Celebrities don't post as many URLs luring people off Twitter, and they don't retweet as often as bots do either.

The researchers presented the findings at the International Conference on

Advances in Social Networks Analysis in Mining, in Sydney, Australia.

As bots gets smarter and more pervasive online,

we humans can still console ourselves

with a different discovery by Gilani.

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