Bots
What are bots?
A bot is a social media account controlled by a computer program. Sometimes bots are harmless: some researchers use bots to study social media, and sometimes bots can be programmed to offer helpful information. Other times, however, bots are programmed to produce or amplify certain kinds of content to mislead and manipulate people on social media. With recent advances in generative AI, it has become much easier to program bots to act in a human-like way, evading detection and more convincingly tricking people. You may have engaged with a bot online and not even realized it!
How can bots affect the information ecosystem?
A single bot on its own cannot do much more harm than a single human-controlled account. But a bot network – many social media accounts centrally commanded by a single computer program – can act in concert to artificially amplify a topic, claim, or personality, far beyond what it deserves (e.g. the Kirkland Lake Bot Campaign). Bot networks have the power to distort the information ecosystem, making some politicians seem more popular than they really are; some ideas more widely accepted than they really are; and some topics more central than they really are.
How do you identify a bot? What do you do about it?
There are some excellent resources for bot spotting, such as this article by the Digital Forensics Research Lab or this one by the Global Investigative Journalism Network. Here are some common patterns to look out for:
The account does not have a profile photo or uses a stock or AI-generated photo
The account’s bio is missing, very short, incoherent, or generic.
The account has few followers, or follows many more than it is followed by.
The account was recently created.
The account reshares others’ content more than it posts its own.
The account reuses the same phrases, possibly with minor modifications.
But be cautious! Social media users fearing reprisal for their political views may maintain social media accounts with minimal identifying information, using generic photos and bios, following many accounts but followed by few others, and may feel safer to share or amplify others’ content rather than taking the risk of publishing their own content. These habits cause them to be mistakenly identified as bots when in fact they are not.
Bot networks can generally be identified more easily than single bot accounts. A bot network may consist of many accounts with the same or similar birthdates, the same or similar profile images and bios, and/or similar engagement patterns or patterns of activity.
If you think you have spotted a bot:
Ask yourself if it seems to be doing anything malicious. If not, just let it be!
If it seems to be up to no good, send us a link and/or a screenshot here.
You may be excited to announce your discovery on social media. Consider telling a friend instead. When you post about bots on social media, you may be inadvertently amplifying their reach or playing into their hands. Bots generally have few followers and thus very little visibility. This is a situation where the remedy can be worse than the malady.