Study reveals 48 million Twitter accounts are actually bots

NEW YORK -- A study released by the University of Southern California reports that roughly nine to 15 percent of Twitter accounts on the microblogging website are so-called bots controlled by software instead of humans.Twitter boasts 319 monthly active users meaning that this recent revelation equates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, according the university’s high-end figure. Those bots are capable of interactions such as “likes,” “retweets” and “following.