People and Bots

By Cody M Parrilla

Bots are programs that people create to do specific jobs, acting like users, on social media platforms. Bots can automatically respond to posts depending on conditions, or by posting content in targeted locations to get trending and influence what shows up in feeds. (Association for Computing Machinery)

Some bots are helpful, and some are harmful. Whether a bot is good or bad depends on what the creator of the bot has created the bot to do and what jobs/tasks the bot is meant to perform. (Impreva)

There are a bunch of reasons, but I will just be saying the most common ways that bots are used. The most common ways that bots are used are for customer service, business, search functionality, and entertainment. (BIGCOMMERCE)

Can bots be harmful? Well, the answer is yes bots can be harmful and one of the most common ways that bots can be harmful are by spreading fake news across different social media platforms. You might be wondering, “how can a bot spread fake news on social media?” Well, if you are then the answer is that they try to get things trending, have fake accounts comment and like the post, and use fake accounts that look like a normal person's account. (CITS)

You might now be asking, “can bots be good?” Well, the answer is yes bots can be good. Bots can be good by performing useful tasks like providing information like, for example, if something is booked the bot can tell you that it is booked, and bots can also send you automated phone calls reminding you of things. Now that you know this you might be wondering “can we benefit from bot use?” Well, the answer is yes and just as I previously said we can benefit from them with automated phone calls, but we can also benefit from them with automated online chat replies. (StreamCreative)

So, with all this information you might be asking yourself “How can I avoid these harmful bots and is there any way to know which bots are harmful?” Well, it might not seem like it but surprisingly the answer is yes. How you might be asking well the way you can avoid harmful bots on social media is by paying attention to these things like What does the profile say about the account, what kind of content does the profile post or engage with, and What are they talking about? (Impreva)

So, with all this information if you are wondering what the future looks like with us and bots then I cannot really give you a solid answer on that, but I can tell you that bots might be able to serve as another tool but if we keep getting bad bots and we do not do anything about them then it can get out of control. (Pew Research Center)