Companion Piece- More About Bots

When writing my DH midterm, I felt that though I did have the chance to talk about bots, I didn't get to really say everything I wanted to say.  In the midterm I touched on the Twitter bot, NRA Tally.  This bot sends out tweets with gun violence statistics accompanied by various NRA quotes.  This however, barely scrapes the surface of what bots are used for.  The NRA Tally is used as a political protest, but what else can these political bots do?

The amount of people your voice reaches on social media is directly correlated to the amount of people that you are either friends with, or follow depending on the platform.  In fact, because of the algorithms designed by the social media companies, people with more friends/followers get recommended to a wider range of people.  Because of this, many politically motivated coders have developed bot-nets, which are the same sort of autonomous bot programs that we have explored, except there is a network of them.  These bot-nets elevate peoples social media status by allowing them to gain (fake) followers, and by extension have more and more opportunities to reach a real audience.  

I know what you're thinking, "Who cares if someone is able to have a few more friends, a couple extra likes, or a little bit more shares?"

THIS HOWEVER IS EXTREMELY NIEVE!!!!!!!!!!!

Think of it this way, who do you feel is going to be a more legitimate voice, a person that has 50 followers, or a person that has 500? What about 5000?

This false legitimacy created by the bot-nets gets expanded more and more as real followers join. We have actually seen this play out during the 2016 Presidential Election.  Russian programmers created social media bot-nets and used this process to give their fake profiles more legitimacy.  After they were satisfied with the number of people in which they were reaching, they began the second part of their plan.  It's no secret that politics in America today are becoming increasingly polarized.  These fake profiles used this truth to attempt to drive a wedge further into the American political spectrum by sharing things related to hot-button political topics.  They capitalized on the anger that many Americans feel towards the political establishment by sharing exclusively negative details of the political race.  Although it can't be definitively determined, many assert that Russian meddling in our election even could have influenced the outcome!!!!!!!

All of this was made possible by bots.  Coders with unethical intentions used our cultural obsession with social media to create even more civil unrest than what had previously existed.  It is clear, if social media doesn't want to be the downfall of democracy, they must do more to prevent these profiles from being collected

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Thanks again,
Erik Bengtson