No Ifs, Ands, or Bots

Do you ever lie awake at night wondering what a bot is? The answer is most likely 'no'. While social media bots are not necessarily the most hot button topic at the moment, they are affect platforms like Facebook, and Twitter in a big way.

Essentially a bot is a programmable application that performs an automated task. When you think 'bot' you might think 'robot' or a big, clunky metallic machine that speaks in an a rhythm, but bots are a little less noticeable. For example, we have welcomed bots into our everyday lives like when we use Siri or Alexa. These are harmless, albeit sometimes sassy, bots that help us with everyday tasks. There is also another kind of bot that we may come in contact with in our every day lives and they are called internet bots and they can be quite disruptive.

A recent example of a disruptive bot was the Microsoft created named Tay. She was a 'teenage' chat-bot put onto twitter that you could interact with. The idea was that Tay would begin reading tweets on twitter, and then tweet out what she thought would be relevant with what her human friends were saying. This idea backfired in a big way when Tay began spitting out racist and offensive messages. So Microsoft said domo arigato and goodbye to Tay and removed her from Twitter

You might be thinking, "these bot things don't seem to be all that intelligent or even have the ability to cause harm to us. While this is true, there have been several movements for Twitter and Facebook to ban the bot. Bots started being seen as a serious threat after a sort of 'botnet' was created. The botnet is made up of millions of social media bots that target Twitter and Facebook accounts that are focused on public opinion. The bots send out millions of fake news messages and circulate the internet and confuse or convince people of wide and false allegations.

“We found that bots can be used to run interventions on social media that trigger or foster good behaviors,” said Ferrara. “This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection. Now we have seen empirically that when you are exposed to a given piece of information multiple times, your chances of adopting this information increase every time.” - Researcher Emilio Ferrara

So yes, this is a serious problem. Typically we want people to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and these bots cause a disruption in the way social media users process new information. Now it's up to you to decide what is true, and what is fake news.