Eli5: Why do ‘social media bots’ exist and who benefits from them?
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Social media bots are software that pretends to be a person on a platform.
Bots are often used by people to artificially increase their follower counts, likes, and shares. This affects the algorithm to make posts appear more often in searches, attracts more people to their channel, and increases their ad revenue.
The technical term for this is Botfarming because you can pay organizations to farm bots for you.
Similar tactics are used in the mobile app market where companies pay Chinese botfarms to like and suggest their app en-mass in order to make it seem better and more well liked than it is.
Fake accounts also plague online dating sites. It’s estimated that men outnumber women on most dating sites by absurd amounts. 9:1 on Tinder, 7:3 on Bumble, 5:1 on Match.com and bots and fake accounts are used to make it seem that there are more women on the platform, with many of them just being straight up scam artists.
Another use is to manipulate public opinion
State actors in Russia and China have used hacker groups to create bots that target Politicians and public figures during elections.
Whenever the politician makes a post several bots would respond within seconds with pre-prepared statements that appeared to disagree or discredit the statement. Similarly bots would post statements that supported the position of other politicians that had policies that were more in line with what the Russian or Chinese regime wanted.
Support or Condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for example.
Since the comments appear at the top it fools people into thinking that there are lots of people that disagree with what this politician is saying. You see this often enough and you start to believe that is the normal.
This helps inflame public opinion on certain subjects, and bots were used to spread panic, conspiracy theories, and misinformation on everything from gun control to vaccines.
Fake accounts and bots account for a surprising amount of traffic on Social Media. Musk recently stated that Twitter assumes that on the low end 5% of followers on the platform are bots, but it could actually be as high as 20-30% or maybe even more
So imagine that 1/3 posts made to a politician are phony, now you start to understand why this affects public opinion.
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