How Bad Are Social Media Bots?

Griffin Shaivitz

gs813919@ohio.edu

Courtesy of Mother Jones

From the standard Kiwifarms trolls to the trolling aspects of cancel culture, trolling has become a prominent mainstay in our internet culture. However, since 2020, there hasn't been such a large and commanding troll presence as the Russian bots that took over many social media sites in an attempt to influence the 2020 election to get Donald Trump into office. Since then, we have seen a significant uptick in noticing bots, Russian or not, which has brought considerable attention to the news we receive on the internet. 

This phenomenon isn't to say that trolling wasn't mainstream pre-2020. As said previously, we have had internet trolls and groups for years. One of the examples was Kiwifarms, a trendy internet forum designed on trolling "lolcows" people who beg for money on the internet or have done despicable things to others that warrant them "trolling" harassing them. However, trolling was mainstream because it was humans behind it. Every troll was a person, not a random server room in a random location. It wasn't one person executing code; it was a group of people. We have the bot trolling, which is more annoying as it's sometimes hard to decern what is and not a bot. However, bots have been wreaking havoc all over news sites, and it has been affecting a lot of people.

Courtesy of Pew Research Center

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that only 2% of people believed that bots none of the news comes from bots, meaning almost everyone believes that our news is just bots on sites like Twitter and Facebook. On top of that, 66% of people said that bots negatively affect the news. However, why have these bots if so many people hate them? Some reasons could be that the bots handle the traffic for which a person or group of people don't have the time. On the other hand, it could be that it helps compile news to send it out, or most importantly, it is quicker on detecting trends to display on the explore page of sites like Twitter.

However, what do we do now? How do we change the bots and get rid of them? The answer is that we can't, and like the idea of fake news, it is something we will have to live with for now. We need to look out for Bots because trolling has gone professional.