The researchers who keep publishing these papers and the patsies in the media who keep repeating them are not identifying bots, in fact they can't know what their own accuracy is because they don't have any way to force verification of accounts. But it's apparent from reading their work that they're usually just identifying humans.

I used to do anti-bot detection and anti-spam work for Google, and have written a takedown of one of these media articles about Twitter bots:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

The paper I studied was riddled with nonsense, fraudulent claims, claims that didn't match their own data, abuse of logic and statistics and massive political bias. It is typical for this space.

This is especially true because real bots (vs the bots that exist in the imagination of political journalists and academics) usually want to sell things. They're quite boring. They aren't engaged in "propaganda". The belief that spammers are spending lots of time and money trying to flood Twitter with political opinions isn't grounded in any sort of reality, and frequently leads to embarrassing claims, like this guy who was pegged as a "Russian bot" but who turned out to be a carpark attendant in Glasgow:

https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll...

These claims about spambots should be seen in the context of a US political campaign in which the losers seemed to be struggling to understand why their preferred candidate lost. The idea that the population has been bulk brainwashed through Twitter doesn't have any basis in psychology or computer science, but is an attractive way to avoid engaging with policy issues.