Exactly who are the Bots?

Etic Lab
Chatbots Magazine
Published in
4 min readSep 8, 2016

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Social Media, Bots, China, Authenticity

As part of our research and development work we are looking into the deployment of Political Bots in Social Media. Currently we are reviewing the academic research literature on the design and deployment of Political Bots in campaigns taking place in the USA, South America and more recently the UK. A fascinating paper just published in the US has drawn our attention to the so-called ’50 cent army’, the huge body of unpaid social media bloggers who act in a concerted way to further the social media goals of the Chinese government. The largest ‘Bot’ army in the world. Although the existence of the ‘army’ has been known about for some time it was widely reported by bloggers, the press and academics that they were paid — hence the 50 cents per post in their name. It was also widely understood that their role was to argue with political dissidents and to attack foreign governments. The research has very thoroughly debunked all of these ideas. Yes they do exist in their hundreds of thousands (perhaps as many as 2,000,000 in fact), but no they do not argue with dissidents on-line and no they do not get paid.

What I found interesting, indeed now that I have thought about it, deeply troubling is the fact that I am unsure how different this army of unpaid social media actors promoting an ideology is from my own experience. I came to the research, as someone who represents the paid, independent thinking, creative and above all individual bloggers, tweeters and Linkedin updaters here in the english speaking world. In short, confident of the cultural superiority of English speaking Social Media discourse. Mindful that I should avoid making unfounded even racist assumptions and keen to learn from this phenomena, I tested my case.

First there is the matter of the fact that the 50 cent army are unpaid, largely but wholly performing their social media role as part of the requirements of their day job. Well as I blog, tweet and etc. for most of the time, that is exactly what I do. Surely though, independent thinking is distinguishing feature of the two approaches? Well firstly the Chinese human bots are not told what to write but rather directed when and and oftentimes what to write about — the actual content is their own. Our content production schedule is often remarkably similar, although I suspect we have devolved the problem as to what issues are to be covered far lower in the organisation than the Chinese government choses to. The question as to whether or not we are more or less creative in our writing is a matter of judgement but I have to say that the overwhelming mass of material produced and pushed through social media does not always bear the hall mark of human creativity, in fact it often quiet the reverse and not least because a lot of material is actually produced and indeed commented upon by Bots of one kind or another.

Finally there is the question of my individuality, the authenticity of the ‘voice’ that is created and disseminated via english speaking social media. Here I came to the worrying conclusion that I have long applied some measure of authenticity to the writings of others. That is to say I always decide based on the context, my take on their motivation and the content, whether or not I feel that someone I am reading is authentic or not. By which I mean the extent to which what they say is a representation of who they are and what they believer or care about. Frankly not only do I frequently come across work produced in an inauthentic voice, but I produce work in this vein myself. In presenting ourselves to others, not least through social media we take care to present ourselves in a voice which is acceptable, meeting norms of language, social values — including political values, that we feel are congruent with the expectations of our audience. In short, there is a place for my individuality in Social Media and I use it. However, by no means is all that I or, I would argue many of us, write individual and authentic. rather we are oftentimes simply followers and even when we are not following we are careful to edit ourselves before creating public discourse.

Our research has already shown how low quality social media content produced by Robots can be very hard, if not impossible to separate from that produced by humans. But now I am left wondering, embedded as I am in reading and writing for the torrent of Social Media feeds — just exactly who are the Bots?

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